The Largest Hack in Crypto Market History: Binance Estimates the Loss at $6.3 Billion

According to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, assets worth $6.3 billion were affected by the hack. That’s more than in all of 2025: back then, attackers stole $2.9 billion in nearly 150 hacks across the crypto industry, according to a report by TRM Labs. Analysts warn that this incident could prompt investors to reassess the risks of holding digital assets.

Together with its partners, including the stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, Binance has frozen approximately $3 billion in assets. The exchange did not disclose the fate of the remaining $3.3 billion, but promised to reimburse all losses, Reuters notes.

According to preliminary data, the attacker likely gained access to one of Binance’s systems through a compromised engineer’s laptop and initiated a withdrawal of funds. The company has found no evidence of a leak of wallet access keys, but the investigation is still ongoing.

TRM Labs and another cybersecurity firm, Pangolin Intelligence, believe the attack was likely carried out by the North Korean group TraderTraitor, according to The Wall Street Journal. This group has been responsible for many of the largest cryptocurrency attacks in recent years. “It was definitely North Korea,” the WSJ quotes Nick Carlsen, a senior investigations specialist at TRM Labs, as saying.

After Binance announced the attack, Bitcoin fell below $77,000 for the first time since September. It had already dropped below $79,000 on Thursday evening, amid initial reports of a possible hack. Over the course of the day, approximately $1.3 billion in long positions were liquidated in the cryptocurrency market, according to Coinglass data cited by Bloomberg. On Friday morning, Bitcoin recouped some of its losses and was trading around $78,200, whereas it had remained in the $80,000 range for most of the week.

Cryptocurrencies were already on shaky ground before the hack: analysts attribute this to high interest rates in the U.S. and declining demand from exchange-traded fund (ETF) investors, according to Reuters. Bloomberg attributes Bitcoin’s decline not only to the attack on Binance but also to the stock sell-off on Wall Street on October 29.

On the Nasdaq after-hours market on Thursday, cryptocurrency-related stocks fell: shares of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase dropped 4.8%, while shares of Strategy, which buys Bitcoin, fell 5.8%. Coinbase stated that the hack did not affect it.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are a tempting target for hackers: unlike stock exchanges, which facilitate trading but do not hold investors’ securities, many of them keep their clients’ cryptocurrency on their own platforms, explains the WSJ. As a result, thefts at crypto exchanges are not uncommon: attackers withdraw customers’ funds from the exchanges’ wallets, intending to cash them out later.

Analysts expect the fallout from the attack on Binance to affect the entire cryptocurrency market. “This could further dampen risk appetite and prompt investors to reassess the security of assets on centralized exchanges,” said Tim Sun, a researcher at Hong Kong-based HashKey Group (as quoted by Reuters).

Bernardo Brites, CEO of Trace Finance—a company that provides payment and infrastructure services for stablecoins—expects changes in customer behavior. “In my view, users will move away from small and medium-sized exchanges. Keeping money on a platform that cannot cover a hack of any significant scale is becoming too risky,” he warned.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor