Binance hack estimated at $5.8–6.3 billion, largest on record
Security & Exploits ·
A suspected breach tied to a compromised employee laptop has frozen withdrawals and sent bitcoin sharply lower.
Binance detected a suspected breach late on Oct. 29 UTC, and on-chain trackers have estimated abnormal outflows across Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron and layer-2 networks at between $5.8 billion and $6.3 billion, which would make it the largest crypto hack on record, according to Bloomberg. Binance has said the issue may trace back to a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop and has suspended both deposits and withdrawals while it investigates.
The exchange has committed to covering losses through its SAFU fund and says infrastructure upgrades and recovery work are underway, according to an announcement posted on Binance's own site. Tether and Circle have moved to freeze more than $2.3 billion in USDT and USDC linked to the attacker's wallets, limiting how much of the stolen funds can be moved or cashed out.
The episode has rattled confidence in exchange security broadly and triggered a sharp market selloff. Bitcoin fell from roughly $81,000 to below $77,000, while ether slid toward $2,200, as the breach compounded a wider risk-off move described by Bloomberg. Wall Street analysts have since pointed to the incident as evidence of exchange-level security failures, with some recommending institutional investors route bitcoin exposure through stock-market proxies rather than hold assets directly on exchanges, per Decrypt.
The U.S. has reportedly opened an investigation into the hack, adding a regulatory dimension to the fallout, and Binance has said it has begun returning assets to affected users as part of its recovery process. Deposits and withdrawals remain suspended, and the full scope of the stolen funds, how much of the frozen stablecoin total will ultimately be recoverable, and when normal trading will resume are not yet known. With five distinct sources now tracking the incident, further detail on the attack vector and Binance's remediation timeline is expected in the coming days.