BBC: Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, says it has frozen around half of the funds stolen in a “complex” hack, after $6.3bn (£4.7bn) was accessed in what is believed to be a record heist.
The firm said $3bn of its stolen digital assets had been secured – but many were still in the hands of unidentified hackers. It initially thought an engineer’s laptop had been compromised, allowing unauthorised withdrawals, but later said the attack was wider.
Several analytics firms have linked the hack, which eclipses a $1.5bn (£1.12bn) heist on the Bybit exchange in 2025, to a North Korean hacking unit. The US Secret Service said it was “working around the clock” “to identify, freeze, trace, and recover” stolen funds.
America’s lead federal agency for investigating financial crimes added that it would “identify the cyber criminals responsible and bring them to justice”, while Binance also said it was working with the FBI.
While Binance said its US-facing exchange was unaffected, the US would still have jurisdiction to investigate the hack and help track down stolen funds – an effort which generally involves a global law enforcement effort.
The hack also involved some US-linked assets, such as stablecoins Tether and Circle – cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar.
Binance told its users “your money is safe, and we’re covering every loss”.It had initially suspended all deposits and withdrawals – but then said in an update that “deposits remain unaffected”.Binance’s co-CEO Richard Teng said: “This was not carried out by one person. Our initial investigation suggested that the security incident may have involved a compromised laptop, however our subsequent investigation has uncovered additional points of breach.”
Teng also describes how the hackers used “a self-destruct mechanism that destroyed tooling and traces as they went, making it more difficult for us to trace and investigate”.
Initially, the company had indicated the breach “may have started with a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop” but later statements have pointed to a broader breach.
In a later update, the firm said it had “set aside” more than $6.34B in company funds to cover the stolen assets and was “actively buying” a range of crypto tokens.
The Binance hack spooked cryptocurrency markets on Friday. The price of Bitcoin was down 5% to $76,800 in Friday afternoon trading in New York.
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase was down 12% as investors also reacted to earnings results in which the firm reported revenue slightly below expectations. Robinhood, a financial services company that trades in cryptocurrency, was down 7.8%.
