Binance Reportedly Hit by $6.3 Billion Attack; Withdrawals Halted

Crypto exchange Binance has been rocked by a cyberattack reported to have caused losses of around $6.3 billion. If the figure holds, the incident would be a record, comfortably surpassing the $1.5 billion attack on the Bybit exchange last year.

The company announced that it will cover all losses, but it has suspended withdrawals while security work is under way. Deposits are continuing as normal.

What Binance has said

According to an announcement on Binance's own website, the estimated total impact of the attack is around $6.3 billion. The company said it has begun freezing affected assets in cooperation with blockchain partners, and that roughly $3 billion has so far been blocked on-chain.

Binance said the losses will be covered from its user protection fund, known as SAFU, and from its own resources, and that user assets are safe. In a separate notice, it said withdrawals were halted so that its security infrastructure could be renewed, while deposits are proceeding normally. The crypto platforms Tether and Circle also said they had frozen $1.5 billion and $800 million respectively in funds linked to the attack. A post by Binance's former chief Changpeng Zhao, however, puts those amounts at about $971 million and $823 million, so the figures differ depending on the source.

How the attack unfolded

Binance's initial review suggests the attack may have begun with a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop. By the exchange's assessment, this allowed the attacker to reach a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. This remains a preliminary finding.

Several reports point to North Korea as the party behind the attack. The security research firm TRM Labs attributed the incident to TraderTraitor, a unit described as North Korea's elite hacking group. The firm said it made the assessment with high confidence based on on-chain and off-chain intelligence, and that it is tracing the funds and alerting partners in real time through Beacon Network, which tracks crypto crime.

Impact on the market and the industry

The scale of the attack stunned the crypto community. Tim Sun, a senior researcher at HashKey Group, said the incident could further dampen risk appetite and push investors to reassess the safety of assets held on centralized exchanges, along with counterparty, solvency and liquidity risks.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao commented on the attack on social media. Writing that he no longer runs Binance.com but, as a shareholder, expects all user funds to be fully covered, Zhao welcomed the quick freezing steps taken by Tether and Circle. Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to a charge related to failures in anti-money-laundering controls and was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2025. The company has a commercial relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto venture.