Binance puts losses at $6.3 bln in crypto industry’s biggest hack

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, stated that $6.3 billion in assets was affected by a cyberattack. That exceeds the total stolen across the crypto industry in all of 2025, when hackers took $2.9 billion across almost 150 attacks, according to a TRM Labs report. The incident could prompt investors to reassess the risks of holding digital assets, analysts warn.

Working with partners including stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, Binance has frozen around $3 billion in assets. The exchange did not disclose the status of the remaining $3.3 billion but pledged to cover all losses, Reuters reports.

An initial investigation suggests the attacker likely gained access to one of Binance’s systems through a compromised engineer’s laptop and initiated unauthorized withdrawals. The company found no evidence that wallet private keys had been leaked, but the investigation is ongoing.

TRM Labs and another cybersecurity company, Pangolin Intelligence, believe the attack appears to have been carried out by North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking group, the Wall Street Journal reports. The group has been behind many of the largest crypto hacks in recent years. “This was absolutely North Korea,” Nick Carlsen, a senior investigator at TRM Labs, told the Journal.

After Binance announced the attack, bitcoin fell below $77,000 per coin for the first time since September. It had already dropped below $79,000 on Thursday evening amid initial reports of a possible hack. Around $1.3 billion in bullish crypto positions was liquidated over 24 hours, Bloomberg reports, citing Coinglass data. On Friday morning, bitcoin recouped some of its losses and was trading around $78,200 per coin, having hovered around $80,000 for most of the week.

Cryptocurrencies were already on shaky ground before the hack, with analysts pointing to high U.S. interest rates and softer demand from exchange-traded funds, Reuters writes. Bloomberg attributes bitcoin’s decline both to the Binance attack and to Thursday’s selloff in equities on Wall Street.

Crypto-related Nasdaq stocks retreated in after-hours trading on Thursday: crypto exchange Coinbase dropped 4.8%, while Strategy, which buys bitcoin, lost 5.8%. Coinbase stated that it was unaffected by the hack.

Crypto exchanges are tempting targets for hackers, the WSJ explains. Unlike stock exchanges, which facilitate trading but do not hold investors’ securities, many crypto exchanges store customers’ cryptocurrencies. Thefts are therefore common: hackers drain money from exchange wallets in the hope of eventually cashing out.

Analysts expect the fallout from the Binance attack to extend across the crypto market. “It may further dampen risk appetite and prompt investors to reassess the safety of assets held on centralised exchanges,” said Tim Sun, a researcher at Hong Kong-based HashKey Group, as quoted by Reuters.

Bernardo Brites, CEO of Trace Finance, a payments and stablecoin infrastructure company, expects customers to change their behavior. He expects users to move away from smaller and medium-sized exchanges, warning that it is “becoming too risky to park your money somewhere that couldn’t cover a hack of meaningful size.”