EASTORA REPORT | In roughly 20 minutes, hackers moved more than $6 billion out of Binance — turning a breach at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange into what analysts are calling the biggest crypto theft ever recorded.
Binance says the total impact is about $6.3 billion. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs puts the amount moved at roughly $6.36 billion across ten blockchains, with most of the transfers completed in a matter of minutes.
TRM Labs and Chainalysis have linked the attack with high confidence to North Korea. TRM identified TraderTraitor, an elite North Korean hacking unit associated with previous major cryptocurrency thefts, as the likely attacker.
Binance’s initial investigation points to a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer. The company says the attacker may have used access to a service container to submit unauthorized withdrawals, while stressing that it has found no evidence that wallet private keys were exposed.
The exchange temporarily halted withdrawals as it investigated the breach and began tracing the stolen assets. Binance says around $3 billion has already been frozen with the help of stablecoin issuers and blockchain partners.
The company has promised to cover all losses using its own resources and its SAFU emergency fund, insisting that customer funds remain safe.
But the scale of the attack goes far beyond one exchange. Binance sits at the center of the global crypto market, and a $6.3 billion breach has reopened the most basic question facing digital assets: how secure is money that can disappear across multiple blockchains in minutes?
North Korea has been accused for years of using cryptocurrency theft to generate foreign currency under international sanctions.
This time, investigators say it may have pulled off the largest crypto heist the industry has ever seen.