Binance halts withdrawals after $6.3bn hack
World’s largest crypto exchange appears to have suffered one of industry’s biggest security breaches
Binance has “temporarily suspended” all deposits and withdrawals as the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange appeared to have fallen victim to one of the industry’s biggest security breaches.
“The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B,” Binance said in a statement late on Thursday. “We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far.”
The exchange said an “initial investigation” suggested hackers had been able to compromise an engineer’s laptop and withdraw funds from the platform. Binance said it found no evidence that unique user codes, known as “private keys”, had been leaked.
Co-founder Yi He said the exchange expected to allow withdrawals again “in the next 48 hours” in a post on X on Friday at midnight New York time.
Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs linked the hack with a North Korean unit known as TraderTraitor, adding that the amount involved would make it “the largest crypto theft on record”. Last year North Korean hackers stole crypto worth $1.5bn in an attack on exchange Bybit.
Bitcoin fell some 4 per cent to $77,229 in the hours after the hack emerged. BNB, the token of the blockchain developed by Binance, dropped 7.5 per cent.
The company earlier said on X that all deposits and withdrawals had been “temporarily suspended while our team conducts security checks, freezes funds, and works with law enforcement”.
Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, had told customers on Thursday night that their “funds are safe” after an apparent “hack on Binance”. The crypto exchange was set up in 2017 and holds about $140bn of digital assets.
Paolo Ardoino, chief executive of Tether, said his company had frozen about $1.5bn of USDT, its $180bn dollar-linked stablecoin. Jeremy Allaire, head of Circle, the second-biggest stablecoin, said $800mn of its coin had been frozen amid “reports of a potential exploit” at Binance.
“Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating. User funds are completely safe,” Binance said on X.
Zhao gave up management of the exchange in 2023 as part of a deal with US authorities. He pleaded guilty to criminal charges relating to inadequate money laundering controls, and was pardoned last year by US President Donald Trump.
The broader crypto market has struggled to gain momentum since a sharp sell-off late last year wiped more than $1tn from the combined capitalisation of about 18,000 digital tokens.
Hackers have repeatedly targeted crypto exchanges in recent years, in some cases making off with hundreds of millions of dollars.
In April, hackers stole $280mn from the coffers of unregulated crypto exchange Drift, the largest so-called perpetual futures exchange on the Solana blockchain.
North Korean hackers stole about $2bn in cryptocurrency in 2025, a 50 per cent increase from the prior year, according to data from Chainalysis.
Thursday’s attack on Binance came hours after Polymarket — another platform wildly popular among young, risk-seeking traders — said it had temporarily halted trading because one of its third-party providers had been “compromised”.
“Anyone who has been impacted will be made whole,” Polymarket said.