Binance suspended deposits and withdrawals and pledged to cover all losses after an apparent hack that the exchange puts at about $6.3 billion, which would make it the largest crypto theft on record.
The biggest crypto exchange by trading volume said Thursday evening that it was looking into a possible security problem, and it told users their funds were “completely safe.”
Founder Changpeng Zhao, who no longer runs the company, said the incident “does look like a hack on Binance.” Binance then paused all deposits and withdrawals and halted trading on its Alpha platform. Co-CEO Yi He said withdrawals will resume once the security scan finishes, but the exchange has not given a target date.
Binance put the impact at about $6.3 billion in a late Thursday update. Chainalysis estimated roughly $5.9 billion had left the exchange, and early on-chain tallies of hot wallet outflows ranged from $2.8 billion to $3.3 billion. The previous record was the $1.5 billion Bybit theft in 2025.
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Binance first confirmed $2.54 billion in verified frozen assets and later raised the figure to about $3 billion. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company froze more than $1.57 billion in USDT, and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said Circle froze more than $800 million in USDC. A freeze restricts the funds but does not return them to Binance.
In its first findings, Binance said an attacker may have compromised a DevOps engineer’s laptop, reached a service container and used it to submit unauthorized withdrawals, according to a report on the exchange’s post. Binance said it found no evidence of a wallet private key leak, and it revoked authorization for the affected address. It has not identified the attacker. The researchers ZachXBT and Blockaid say North Korea is the likely culprit, but that assessment remains unconfirmed.
Binance said it will pay for the losses out of its Secure Asset Fund for Users and company money. The fund holds about $1 billion worth of bitcoin, a fraction of the estimated loss. DefiLlama data put customer assets on the platform at about $144 billion before the attack.
Bitcoin fell to roughly $77,000, a six-week low. Ether dropped as much as 6%, and BNB, Binance’s token, lost about 8%. Binance has promised an updated proof-of-reserves disclosure after it completes remediation, along with a technical post-mortem after it verifies the facts.
