Binance estimates USD 6.3 billion hacked in crypto’s biggest heist

Binance has estimated a $6.3 billion impact from a security incident and suspended all deposits and withdrawals while it investigates. Founder Changpeng Zhao said it „does look like a hack”. If confirmed, it would be the largest crypto heist on record, more than four times the $1.5 billion taken from Bybit last year.

The response has been fast. Binance says around $3 billion has already been frozen, with Tether and Circle among the firms freezing funds on their side. The preliminary cause points to a compromised engineer’s laptop, and Binance says it has found no evidence that wallet private keys were exposed. TRM Labs has linked the attack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group.

Marcel Van Oost, the founder of „Connecting the dots in fintech” commented: „The biggest crypto hack ever just happened, and the suspect is a government. A $6.3 billion theft isn’t just a record, it dwarfs everything before it, and TRM Labs and the FBI pointing at North Korea’s Lazarus Group reframes what this is. This isn’t a lone hacker, it’s a sanctioned state using crypto theft as a funding line for its regime, and the world’s largest exchange was the target.

That’s the uncomfortable truth as crypto institutionalizes: the more value it holds, the bigger a prize it becomes for the most sophisticated attackers on earth. Binance freezing around $3 billion and pledging to cover losses shows incident response has matured, which matters, but it doesn’t erase the scale of the breach. It lands in a stretch of security scares, Polymarket, Bitget, Coinbase, that all point the same way. Crypto’s hardest problem was never building the technology. It’s defending it, at a scale and against adversaries most of traditional finance never had to face.„

He added: „Binance has pledged to cover all user losses from its SAFU fund and company reserves. The big question is whether that’s enough to keep users’ trust.”

„The Binance hack response highlights a key issue in digital finance. The ability to freeze stolen assets can help victims, but it also means that having a private key does not always give you full control over your tokens.” – commented Yaroslav Meretskyi, CEO – Jurisprudential Consulting Group in a blog article entitled „After the Binance Hack: Your Keys, but Who Can Freeze Your Money?„