Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, suspended withdrawals after hackers broke into its digital wallets and made off with roughly $6 billion, in what is shaping up to be the largest crypto heist on record. Founder Changpeng Zhao confirmed the breach in a post on X, writing that it does look like a hack on Binance.
The breakdown of what was taken spans multiple assets. The attackers took $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, a similar amount in the stablecoin Tether, and slightly under a billion dollars combined in Ethereum and the USDC stablecoin, a spread that suggests the hackers moved quickly across whatever liquid assets were accessible rather than targeting a single token.
Stablecoin issuers moved fast once the breach became known. Tether froze approximately $971 million of the stolen funds, and Circle froze about $823 million in USDC, using the centralized control both companies retain over their tokens to block the attacker from moving or cashing out a significant portion of what was taken, even after the theft itself had already occurred.
Zhao, who stepped back from day-to-day management of Binance.com some time ago, sought to reassure users directly. User funds are safe, he wrote, adding that as a shareholder, he expects all user funds will be fully covered, language aimed at heading off a panic-driven run on the exchange while the full scope of the breach is still being assessed.
No group has claimed responsibility, and Binance itself has not publicly named a suspect, but cybersecurity firm TRM and other researchers have said North Korea is almost certainly behind the attack, consistent with the country's long track record of state-linked hacking operations targeting major crypto exchanges for hard currency.
The market reaction was immediate. Bitcoin briefly fell below $79,000 and Ethereum dropped under $2,240 as news of the hack spread, a reminder of how directly confidence in major exchange infrastructure translates into price action across the broader crypto market, even for assets with no direct exposure to the stolen funds themselves.
With roughly $1.8 billion of the stolen total already frozen by stablecoin issuers, the final scale of the loss Binance and its users actually absorb will depend heavily on how much of the remaining funds investigators and exchanges manage to trace and block before the attackers can convert them into untraceable assets.
