Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by assets, says a security incident on Thursday, 29 October 2026 led to unauthorised withdrawals with an estimated financial impact of about $6.3 billion. The exchange says user funds are safe and that it will cover all losses from its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) and from company funds.
Deposits and withdrawals were temporarily suspended on several networks as a precaution while security checks continue. Working with blockchain partners, Binance says it has frozen roughly $3 billion of the affected assets on-chain, close to half of the estimated total.
According to the exchange’s initial investigation, the attacker probably got in through a compromised laptop belonging to one of its DevOps engineers, reached an internal service container and submitted withdrawal requests that had not been authorised. A later review found further points of breach, which Binance has not located publicly. The National reported that Binance found no evidence that its wallet private keys had leaked and that it had revoked the affected address authorisations.
“This was a complex attack, and we are doing all we can in coordination with law enforcement to resolve it,” Binance said in a statement carried by ABC News. It has promised a detailed technical post-mortem once the facts are verified, and an updated Proof of Reserves, the report showing the assets it holds against customer balances, after remediation is complete.
Changpeng Zhao, the founder who no longer runs Binance but remains its largest shareholder, wrote on X that “it does look like a hack” and said he expected users’ funds to be fully covered, CoinDesk and TechCrunch reported.
Stablecoin issuers moved quickly. Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino said more than $1.56 billion in USDT had been frozen, while Circle chief executive Jeremy Allaire said his company had frozen more than $800 million in USDC together with law enforcement, according to CoinDesk.
On who was behind it, blockchain analytics firm TRM said it had “high confidence” that TraderTraitor, a hacking unit linked to North Korea, was responsible, Al Jazeera reported. Binance has not commented on that assessment.
At this scale the incident far exceeds the roughly $1.5 billion Bybit hack of 2025, which until now was the largest theft in crypto history. Binance is the biggest exchange by assets under management, with about $155 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data cited by Al Jazeera.
Markets reacted at once. Bitcoin fell 4.5% to $76,664 early on Friday, Ether dropped 5.2% and BNB, the token tied to the exchange, slid 7.1%, The National reported, while more than $1.5 billion of trades made with borrowed money were forcibly closed over 24 hours. CoinDesk quoted Geoffrey Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, as saying prices could stay under pressure until the frozen assets are released and more details of the attack emerge.
SAFU was set up in 2018 to protect users in emergencies and has historically held about $1 billion. Binance has not said how the compensation will be split between the fund and its own money, or when withdrawals will resume.
