The world's largest crypto exchange looks like it's been robbed blind. Starting Thursday afternoon New York time, billions in digital assets began flowing out of wallets controlled by Binance to unknown addresses, and by Friday morning the suspected theft ranked as the largest crypto heist in history — roughly $5.9 billion, according to Chainalysis estimates reported via CoinDesk. That's nearly four times the $1.5 billion Bybit hack of February 2025, the previous record.
The timeline, per Protos' live coverage: illegitimate withdrawals began no later than 4:30pm Thursday, with smaller prior transactions spotted earlier in the day; Binance started halting withdrawals around 6pm and made it official at 6:22pm; by 8pm Arkham Intelligence pegged the outflow above $5.8 billion across Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Tron. Binance itself has confirmed no loss figure — its verified frozen total started at $2.54 billion Thursday evening and has since climbed to about $3 billion.
Then came the counterattack, and it was centralized finance doing the fighting. Tether froze more than $1.5 billion in USDT tied to the incident — Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino put the figure at $1.57 billion, per DigitalToday — Circle froze over $800 million in USDC in coordination with law enforcement, and World Liberty Financial and Paxos joined in. Co-CEO Yi He said withdrawals will stay off until systems are confirmed secure and pointed to the exchange's emergency fund covering any user losses, while founder Changpeng Zhao said it "does look like a hack" and expects customers to be made whole, according to TechWeez.
Two things matter here. First, how the money moved: from hot wallets — internet-connected by design so the exchange can process trades fast. Binance has not explained how the attacker got in. One unconfirmed report suggests a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, and TRM Labs has reportedly linked the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean-linked group, per a Mezha report — the same actor class behind Bybit. Second, how it was stopped: issuers locking wallets. The irony is sharp: the coins that could be frozen were saved, and the genuinely uncensorable ones — Bitcoin and Ether — are the ones the thief kept.
The market flinched, then stabilized: Bitcoin slipped about 3% to just under $79,000 and Binance's own BNB dropped nearly 7%. The exchange that survived its founder's money-laundering conviction now has to prove the biggest robbery in crypto history doesn't touch user funds. The promise is on the record. The proof — withdrawals reopening — isn't there yet.
— via TechWeez