Binance hack: up to $5.8B leaves wallets, loss near $1B

A Binance hot wallet was emptied in a single transaction on Thursday 29 October at about 21:24 Paris time. According to an estimate by Coinbase executive Conor Grogan, up to $5.8 billion in assets left the exchange's wallets across several blockchains. If all of it was stolen, that would be nearly four times the record set by Bybit, which lost $1.5 billion in February 2025.

Founder Changpeng Zhao was the first to call it a hack, writing on X that it "does look like a hack". The targeted wallet, "Binance 14", is connected to the internet to process customer withdrawals. It sent 167,464 ether and 63 other tokens to a brand-new address, including $1.6 billion in USDT. Public Ethereum data shows the attacker received initial funds a day earlier through Tornado Cash, then linked the wallet to their own program using EIP-7702. Security firm Blockaid is investigating about $3.3 billion in outflows; the true amount stolen is not yet known.

Frozen funds cut the loss

Tether and Circle froze funds within the hour: Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino announced more than $1.56 billion in USDT frozen, and Circle blocked about $823 million in USDC. Ether cannot be frozen. DefiLlama's founder, posting as 0xngmi, calculates the remaining loss at roughly $1 billion, or 0.69% of the roughly $144 billion Binance holds for clients. Zhao said the loss could be "a bit higher" but "will be covered".

Binance's SAFU emergency fund now holds only bitcoin, 15,000 BTC worth about $1.2 billion at roughly $79,000. That covers the estimate on paper, with little margin. Binance has pledged to top it up if it falls below $800 million, which would happen if bitcoin dropped below about $53,000.

Communication and market impact

Binance itself only mentions a "possible security issue" and says user funds are "totally safe". Edit history reviewed by FinanceFeeds shows the statement was rewritten twice in 13 minutes. Co-CEO Yi He said withdrawals were suspended while systems are checked. Coinbase and Binance.US said they were unaffected.

Bitcoin and ether fell 2% to 4% within the hour, and BNB fell up to 6%. Forced liquidations of leveraged positions reached $627.7 million. Binance urges users to distrust messages outside its official channels and never share a recovery phrase. The cause of the attack and the final loss have not yet been disclosed.