Binance has suspended all transactions as it investigates a cyberattack, the crypto exchange stated on X, promising to cover all users’ losses. “It does look like a hack on Binance,” company founder and co-owner Changpeng Zhao wrote on X while assuring users that their funds are safe.
According to the latest data reported by Binance, the total damage amounts to approximately $6.3 billion. If the figure is confirmed, it will be the largest cryptocurrency theft in history. The exchange claims it has managed to freeze about $3 billion of the stolen funds, meaning the hackers will not be able to transfer or cash out those specific tokens. A preliminary investigation showed that the incident may be linked to the hacking of a DevOps engineer’s laptop.
Experts at the cybersecurity companies TRM Labs and Pangolin Intelligence believe the theft was carried out by the North Korean hacker group TraderTraitor, The Wall Street Journal writes. TRM senior investigator Nick Carlsen told the newspaper that, together with colleagues from Pangolin Intelligence, he compared the hackers’ activity on the blockchain with data collected in investigations of other North Korea-linked attacks. “It is definitely North Korea,” Carlsen said.
The previous record for cryptocurrency theft was set in 2025, when hackers stole $1.5 billion from the crypto exchange Bybit. The FBI concluded that the North Korean group TraderTraitor was also behind that crime.
