Binance disclosed Friday that a security incident resulted in an estimated $6.3 billion in losses, with approximately $3 billion in stolen cryptocurrency frozen on-chain. Co-CEO Richard Teng said the exchange would cover all losses using its Secure Asset Fund for Users and company funds.
The company's initial investigation suggests a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop allowed an attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. Teng later clarified the attack involved a complex process rather than misuse of a single engineer's permissions. Binance found no evidence of wallet private key leaks.
The exchange temporarily suspended withdrawals while upgrading security systems and revoked affected address authorizations. It expected to resume withdrawal services within 48 hours. Deposits remained unaffected. Binance is working with law enforcement and blockchain intelligence firms to trace and recover stolen funds and plans to publish a technical post-mortem and updated Proof of Reserves after remediation.
Several other crypto firms froze funds tied to the hack. Circle Internet Group froze over 800 million USD Coin. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino froze more than 1.5 billion USDT. Ripple's Jack McDonald said the firm was freezing affected RLUSD stablecoin funds and helped halt $200 million in movement linked to the attack.
Crypto data provider Arkham Intelligence identified nearly $6 billion in digital assets across bitcoin, ether, solana, and various stablecoins linked to 55 wallet addresses potentially tied to the exploit.
Bitcoin fell more than 4% to $77,994.96 on Friday. Circle's stock tumbled about 5% in after-hours trading Thursday.