The attack started on October 29, Thursday, and by Friday morning, it was already the biggest hack of any crypto exchange in history. According to Binance, which is the world’s largest crypto exchange, the security breach cost an estimated $6.3 billion.
The amount is quite huge in the domain. Previously, the biggest hack involved about $1.4 to $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin from Bybit in February 2025.
The company has been prudent with their language. According to an announcement to Al Jazeera, Binance mentioned that their teams are “working around the clock” on solving this problem.
Prior to this announcement, the founder, Changpeng Zhao, mentioned that the exchange was hacked. The company referred to the situation as a “security incident” with an impact estimation, instead of providing the exact amount of stolen money.
In the course of time when the company tried to freeze the stolen money, they blocked all deposits and withdrawals.
The first findings highlight a weakness in humans. Binance's early findings indicate that the laptop of the DevOps engineer used by the attacker could be vulnerable.
According to Binance, there was no evidence of leakage of wallet private keys.
Blockaid provided blockchain analysis for additional details. Blockaid identified the attack to be initiated through 50 signatures transferred in a single transaction from the hot wallet Binance 14. In 12 minutes, ten other hot wallets followed suit.
These are early findings. The investigation is ongoing.
Not all the money has disappeared, though. Around $3 billion of the stolen money has been found and frozen, while around $3.3 billion still remains unidentified.
There were some helps from other companies. Tether, Circle, and Ripple have frozen the stolen stable coins. Ripple has frozen around $200 million.
The hacker hasn’t stopped either. According to Arkham data, the wallet associated with the hack has moved the money through the decentralized exchange Uniswap. At some point, the hacker’s wallets contained more than $5.7 billion.
There were also some different estimations. For instance, according to Chainalysis, they would be updating their estimation to $5.9 billion.
The most important guarantee for the regular clients was provided promptly. Co-founder of Binance Yi He is guaranteed to compensate all losses due to the hacking.
Binance also confirmed the restoration of the losses suffered by the users, adding that the attack targeted Binance.com only. When reviewing reports, there is no information about resuming withdrawals.
However, attribution is still pending. As Axios noted, there were allegations that the hack was linked to North Korea. This comes as no surprise. After all, state-sponsored hackers from North Korea were behind the attack on Bybit last year.
Binance itself has yet to confirm the attribution.
The reaction from Bitcoin came fast. The currency dropped by around 5 percent and fell below $77,000.
There were concerns that there could be more harm than just the fall in prices. Sean Foley, an expert at Macquarie University, said that a blow to the confidence of Binance can shock the retail investors, leading to lower prices.
"The largest hack in history," said Aravind Srinivasan of the market maker GSR.
Crypto theft was on an upward trend. Criminals stole $2.87 billion worth of crypto assets through almost 150 hacks in 2025, reported by TRM Labs.
According to Axios, the hack took place in "Black October," which involved a string of security breaches and AI-discovered vulnerabilities that caused global panic.
One analysis report pointed out that the unaccounted-for amount alone surpasses the total amount of crypto theft in the previous year.
