Binance has suspended all withdrawals after the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange fell victim to what appears to be the biggest heist in history.
The exchange put the “estimated total impact” of the hack at about $6.3 billion and said around $3 billion of affected assets, mainly stablecoins that act as cash for the crypto market, had been frozen.
But analysts at Elliptic said the attacker had changed about $3.3 billion into digital assets that could not be frozen and was working to cash those out as traditional currency.
An “initial investigation” suggested hackers had been able to compromise an engineer’s laptop and withdraw funds from the platform, Binance said, adding on Friday morning that further investigation “has uncovered additional points of breach.” The company is working with law enforcement.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs linked the hack with a North Korean unit known as TraderTraitor, saying that the sums involved would make it “the largest crypto theft on record.” Last year, North Korean hackers stole crypto worth $1.5 billion in an attack on exchange Bybit.
Peter Ward, of the Sejong Institute in Seoul, said North Korea had considerable expertise and offered “near-total protection to its hackers.”
“Things may get a lot worse going forward,” he said.
Binance said on Friday that it had “already reserved over $6.34 billion of company funds to cover this incident,” with $5 billion of the funds “already held in the exact token assets that were impacted.”
The company said it was actively buying more tokens in order to cover the remaining amount. “This step can take longer because some tokens may have low liquidity” and settlement “also takes time,” it said.
The hack is a major blow to Binance, which was co-founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, and holds about $140 billion of digital assets. In 2023, the company pleaded guilty to US criminal charges related to breach of anti-money laundering laws and paid a $4.3 billion fine.
