Binance Repays 90% of $6.3 Billion Stolen in Record Hack

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, said on Saturday that it has already covered 90% of the $6.3 billion in assets stolen in a breach of its systems disclosed earlier this week. The company confirmed it will keep its promise to fully compensate users for funds taken from hot wallets.

"All assets in BTC, ETH, USDT, BNB, SOL, USDC, XRP, USD1, RLUSD and ZEC are 100% backed," the company said in its statement. "Binance takes on all financial consequences of this theft; our users will not be harmed."

How the losses are being covered

To make users whole, Binance drew on its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU), part of its futures insurance fund and corporate money. The company stressed that restoring reserves is not the same as recovering the stolen funds: the search for the assets and efforts to get them back continue separately.

A Binance representative said the remaining 10% relates to less liquid tokens outside the top 10 by market capitalization. Buying them may take longer, and the exchange will acquire the missing assets through market and over-the-counter channels until the shortfall is fully covered.

Withdrawals and unanswered questions

Although the investigation is not finished, Binance intends to let users withdraw funds again on Sunday, provided security checks are passed successfully.

How the attackers got in, and how they made off with a record sum, is still unclear. The first theory pointed to a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer. Exchange management later said the attack was more complex and did not rely solely on one employee's access rights.

For users, the key points are that balances in the major listed assets are said to be fully backed and that access is expected to return within a day. The cause of the breach and the fate of the stolen funds remain open, and those answers will determine how far confidence in the exchange recovers.