Binance Freezes Withdrawals After a Suspected Hack

Binance suspended all deposits and withdrawals in the early hours of 30 October after users and blockchain watchers saw large sums leaving its hot wallets on the afternoon of 29 October. The exchange called it a "potential security issue" on its official X account and also paused trading on Binance Alpha, its platform for early-stage tokens, according to Techweez and InvestingLive.

Co-CEO Yi He said user funds are safe and that "Binance will cover all hacking losses", and promised a full post-mortem, Bitcoin.com News reported. Binance says it will pay from its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU), the emergency reserve it set up in 2018, and from company funds, according to IBTimes UK. Founder Changpeng Zhao, who no longer runs the exchange, wrote that it "does look like a hack on Binance".

What is confirmed, and what is not

The confirmed numbers are the freezes. Tether's chief executive, Paolo Ardoino, said Tether froze more than 1.567 billion USDT, and Circle's Jeremy Allaire said Circle froze more than 800 million USDC with law enforcement, according to Bitcoin.com News. Binance's own verified frozen total rose from $2.54 billion to about $3 billion during the night, and the exchange says it will "only share confirmed figures", Techweez reported.

The size of the theft is not confirmed. On-chain tallies cited by Bitcoin.com News put suspected outflows at about $5.57 billion across Ethereum, Bitcoin and Tron, with wider estimates near $5.8 billion, while FinanceFeeds tracked about $3.3 billion leaving Binance's Ethereum hot wallets, InvestingLive reported. Analysts quoted in those reports warn that the higher totals may include transfers unrelated to the attack. IBTimes UK reports that Binance estimates the total impact at about $6.3 billion, and stresses that this is not a confirmed theft figure.

• Confirmed: deposits and withdrawals are paused, with no date to reopen.
• Confirmed: about $3 billion frozen, by Binance's count, including Tether's and Circle's freezes.
• Claimed: user funds are safe and all losses will be covered (Binance).
• Unconfirmed: the final amount taken, who did it, and whether the theft is over.

How it may have happened

Binance's preliminary finding is that a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer may have let an attacker reach a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions, IBTimes UK reported. Binance says it has found no evidence that a wallet's private key leaked, and that it has revoked the affected authorisation. Security firm Blockaid pointed to a delegation feature added to Ethereum in 2025, according to Bitcoin.com News, but that explanation does not cover the Bitcoin and Tron movements, and the cause has not been established.

Freezing is not the same as recovering. Stablecoin issuers can lock tokens at a blacklisted address; native assets such as Bitcoin and Ether have no issuer that can freeze them. Recovery through issuers or courts usually takes weeks, InvestingLive noted.

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How it compares

If the early estimates hold, this would be the largest theft from a crypto exchange on record, ahead of the roughly $1.5 billion taken from Bybit in February 2025, which was attributed to North Korea's Lazarus group, Techweez reported. Some researchers have raised possible North Korean involvement this time, but there is no official attribution. Binance's SAFU fund holds about $1 billion in Bitcoin, according to InvestingLive, enough for the lowest loss estimate; anything near the higher figures would have to come from Binance's own balance sheet.

Markets fell on the news. Bitcoin slipped below $79,000 on Thursday and BNB, Binance's own token, dropped about 7% to around $704, according to Techweez. Coinglass recorded about $1.4 billion of liquidations over 24 hours, Bitcoin.com News reported, though not all of it can be tied to Binance. Binance.US and Coinbase both said they were not affected.

What is still unknown

• When withdrawals will reopen, and in what order.
• The final loss, and how much of the frozen stablecoin will actually come back.
• Whether Binance will publish an updated proof of reserves, which it has promised after the clean-up.