Cryptocurrency platform Binance said on Thursday that it had fallen victim to a major cyberattack affecting approximately $6.3 billion (€5.5 billion) in funds, with around half of that amount frozen to prevent a massive theft.
The company – the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume – posted a series of sometimes contradictory messages on X, insisting that “user funds are SAFU” while also stating that it would “cover all losses”.
The company later said on its Latin America X account that “the estimated total impact is approximately $6.3 billion (€5.5 billion)”.
“We have been working with blockchain partners to freeze the affected assets, with approximately $3 billion (€2.6 billion) frozen so far,” it added.
That would be more than four times the amount involved in what had previously been the largest cyberattack of its kind: $1.5 billion (€1.3 billion) stolen from the Bybit platform in February last year – an attack attributed to hackers linked to North Korea.
At around 00:30 GMT (02:30 CEST) on Friday, Binance said all deposits and withdrawals had been “temporarily suspended while our team conducts security checks, freezes funds and works with law enforcement”.
“This figure may continue to increase as our teams work closely with law enforcement, issuers, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to track and freeze additional assets,” the company said.
In its statement on X, Binance said an initial investigation suggested that the hack involved a compromised laptop belonging to a “DevOps engineer”, allowing an unauthorised party to access a “service container” and execute unauthorised withdrawal transactions.
“We have found no evidence of any private key leakage from the wallets,” Binance said.
“We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts have been fully verified.”
“It looks like an attack on Binance,” said former Binance chief Changpeng Zhao, who no longer runs the group but remains its majority shareholder.
Paolo Ardoino, head of Tether – the company behind the cryptocurrency known as USDT – said his firm had frozen approximately $1.6 billion (€1.4 billion) “in connection with a potential attack on the Binance exchange”.
Jeremy Allaire, head of cryptocurrency platform Circle, said his company had frozen more than $800 million (€696 million) in USDC.
USDT and USDC are both “stablecoins”, or digital currencies whose value is pegged to a traditional currency, in this case the US dollar.
The US Department of Justice and the FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Cryptocurrency prices fall sharply
For several hours before Binance confirmed the attack, industry observers had reported that hackers had managed to breach the platform.
Prices of most major cryptocurrencies fell following news of the cyberattack, with the exception of stablecoins, which by definition fluctuate only within narrow limits.
At around 04:00 GMT (06:00 CEST), Bitcoin and Ethereum were down 0.8%, recovering after having fallen by nearly 5% and almost 6%, respectively. BNB, Binance’s native cryptocurrency, rose by 2.7% after dropping by nearly 10%.
The attack on Binance comes at a time when many observers are raising concerns that the rapidly expanding capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) models could compromise cryptography and IT security protocols.
