Binance says about $6.3 billion in crypto was affected by a security breach on October 29, 2026. The exchange paused withdrawals, and BNB, BTC and ETH all fell in early trading on Friday. Binance says it has frozen about $3 billion with partners and will cover customer losses.
Binance hack: what we know
- Amount: Binance puts the total impact at about $6.3 billion. TRM Labs counts $6.36 billion in outflows, using prices at the time of each transfer.
- When: The main transfers began around 20:05 UTC on October 29 and moved most of the funds within about 20 minutes.
- Frozen: Binance says about $3 billion was frozen with partners. Tether says it froze more than $1.56 billion, and Circle says it froze more than 800 million USDC. Frozen funds are not the same as recovered funds.
- Withdrawals: Binance paused withdrawals. Reports on the status of deposits differ, so check Binance’s own updates.
- Binance.US: It says its operations were not affected.
How the breach happened
Binance’s early investigation points to a compromised engineer’s laptop, which may have let an attacker reach an internal system and make unauthorized withdrawals. Binance says it has found no evidence that wallet private keys leaked. It has involved law enforcement and promised a technical report.
TRM Labs attributes the attack to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group. Binance has not confirmed who was behind it.
Will users lose money?
Binance says user funds are safe and that it will cover all customer losses from its SAFU fund and company funds. It has not published a final loss figure. It also plans to publish an updated proof of reserves after it finishes its fixes.
BNB, BTC and ETH price reaction
In early trading on Friday, Bitcoin (BTC) fell about 4.5%, Ether (ETH) about 5.2% and BNB more than 7%. BTC briefly dropped to about $76,500 overnight. About $1.5 billion in crypto positions were liquidated over 24 hours, and most were longs, according to CoinGlass data. The Fear & Greed Index dropped from 51 to 30 in a day.
The same morning, about $11 billion in BTC options on Deribit expired. They settled at $78,119.01, close to the $78,000 max pain level. We covered that in our bitcoin options expiry article.
What to watch next
- When Binance reopens withdrawals
- Binance’s technical report and updated proof of reserves
- How much of the frozen $3 billion is returned
Note: figures come from Binance statements, TRM Labs and news reports, and are still changing. This article is for information only and is not financial advice. Never share your seed phrase and use only official Binance links.
Sources: Forbes, crypto.news, Tokenist, FinanceFeeds.