Finance1 min read

Binance hacked: Will you lose your Bitcoins?

By · Published by Everything Blog

In short

Attackers leveraged a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop and breached the exchange's hot-wallet signing infrastructure to execute unauthorized withdrawals within twenty minutes. Tether and Circle successfully froze approximately $2.7 billion in stablecoins by blacklisting targeted addresses. However, recovering decentralized holdings remains difficult because networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum lack central authorities capable of freezing wallets. Binance maintained that its private keys were not leaked during the incident.

Key points

  • Binance pledged to fully cover all user losses and stated there is no evidence that walle…: Binance pledged to fully cover all user losses and stated there is no evidence that wallet private keys were leaked.
  • Decentralized assets like Ethereum and Bitcoin cannot be unilaterally frozen by central i…: Decentralized assets like Ethereum and Bitcoin cannot be unilaterally frozen by central issuers, complicating asset recovery efforts.
  • Investigators continue to track 19 wallets where the perpetrator still holds more than 42…: Investigators continue to track 19 wallets where the perpetrator still holds more than 420,000 Ethereum and roughly 18,270 Bitcoin.

Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1

The incident also raises an important question for millions of people who hold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on Binance: Could they lose their money because of the hack?

Binance has assured customers that their funds are safe and that it will cover all losses arising from the incident. The exchange has also been working with blockchain companies, cryptocurrency issuers and law enforcement agencies to trace and recover the stolen assets.

Who hacked Binance and stole $6.3 billion?

Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs has attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a hacking unit associated with North Korea. The firm said it reached this conclusion with high confidence after examining on-chain transactions and other intelligence. According to TRM Labs, the attacker moved approximately $6.36 billion out of Binance wallets across 10 different blockchain networks. Most of the transfers took place within around 20 minutes.The group was also linked to the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in February 2025, which was previously considered the biggest cryptocurrency theft on record. Binance has not independently confirmed the identity of the attackers. The exchange is cooperating with investigators…

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