About 2 hours later (22:30 UTC), Binance acknowledged the exploit and issued the first statement of a potential attack. It suspended all deposits and withdrawals and opened investigations.
Binance hack update: Nearly $3B stolen funds frozen
In a follow-up, the world’s largest crypto exchange said estimated stolen funds were about $6.3B. This was at 02:25 AM UTC on Friday, 30th October 2026. That’s about 3 hours after the initial preliminary investigation announcement.
The $6.3B figure makes the Binance hack the largest ever in crypto history. The attacker drained Binance hot wallets across 10 chains.
On Ethereum, the attacker siphoned $3.74B worth of crypto assets. On the Bitcoin network, the attacker stole 18,270.2 $BTC worth $1.47B. On TRON, the hacker moved $612.7M $USDT and 46.4M TRX (total $627M). Solana, Arbitrum, and Avalanche recorded $96M, $32M and $24M drains, respectively.
In fact, the Ethereum and Bitcoin drains dominated 83% of the $6.3B heist.
Industry partners, including Tether, Circle, Ripple, Paxos, Arbitrum, World Liberty Financials, and Binance itself, have frozen about $2.8B already. That’s nearly half of the heist, most stablecoins with freezing features.
However, the attacker can still move $BTC and $ETH assets, worth about $3.27B, according to on-chain and security analyst Dickson Wu.
According to Web3 security investigator Zachary Wolk (popularly known as ZachXBT) and Chainalysis, North Korea’s TraderTraitor was behind the hack, citing co-mingling of Binance’s stolen funds with Bitget’s $388M exploit address.
For its part, Binance traced the exploit to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop. This allowed TraderTraitor to gain access to the exchange’s internal infrastructure and sign off on transfers.
The exchange also maintained that there were no wallet private key leaks and pledged to cover all losses.
Impact of the Binance hack
The hack soured market sentiment to ‘fear’ levels last seen in August. It dropped $BTC’s value by 7% to $76.5K, before an attempted rebound.
However, analyst Benson Sun downplayed the hack’s impact on Bitcoin, noting that it will take years to liquidate. In doing so, he drew a parallel to the Coldcard and Bitfinex hacks.
So, the stolen $BTC looks like bad news on the surface, but it’s actually a disguised form of locked-up supply.
Final Summary
- Binance estimates total stolen funds to be $6.3B, with half of the stash now frozen.
- Stolen $1.5B $BTC won’t be sold immediately, but $ETH could face more pressure.
