The Heist of the Century: Binance Hacked, $6.3 Billion Stolen in Minutes – Are You Affected?

Binance, the world's first cryptocurrency exchange platform, was the victim of a hack this Thursday, October 29, 2026, which the company estimates to be worth around $6.3 billion. This is four times more than the previous record, that of Bybit in February 2025, and the analysis company TRM Labs attributes the attack to North Korean hackers.

According to the reconstruction published by TRM Labs, the hackers prepared the attack for at least 36 hours. On the morning of October 28, a wallet used by the attackers received three small withdrawals from the Tornado Cash mixer, then the malicious code was tested on two wallets on October 29, and a final time on a third, approximately four hours before the attack. The theft itself began at 8:05 p.m. BST, when five Binance wallets on the XRP network sent 233.46 million XRP to a single address. At 8:20 p.m., a Bitcoin wallet on the platform transferred 18,270 bitcoins, and in the next two minutes, a wallet on the Tron network sent 612.7 million USDT. On Ethereum, the hackers submitted 50 pre-signed authorizations at the same time, which gave them control of the Binance wallet, and in 3 minutes and 24 seconds, they emptied its entire balance, i.e. 167,464 ether and 1.615 billion USDT. In total, ten blockchains were affected, and a second wave targeted the Avalanche and Polygon wallets around 11:05 p.m.

It was Binance founder Changpeng Zhao who first confirmed the hack. “This sure looks like a Binance hack,” he wrote on X, assuring that he expected users’ funds to be “fully covered.” Binance then suspended withdrawals on several networks, then deposits, as a precaution. “Our teams are working day and night to resolve this issue securely and completely,” said the platform, which claims that its customers’ funds are “completely safe.” Yi He, co-founder and co-leader of Binance, said the company would cover “all losses related to the hack”, thanks to its SAFU emergency fund, which contains around $1 billion in bitcoins, and its own funds.

Our team is conducting security checks. Withdrawals will resume as soon as the security issue is fully resolved.

We’ll keep you updated. Thank you for your patience. pic.twitter.com/7NuxbZwE3M

On the night of October 29 to 30, Binance published the first results of its investigation. “Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve the compromised laptop of a DevOps engineer,” explains the company, which specifies that the attacker could have accessed a service container and initiated unauthorized withdrawals. She adds that she has not found “the slightest evidence of a wallet private key leak” and promises a detailed analysis once the investigation is complete. TRM Labs, for its part, believes that the hackers controlled the Binance transaction signing system on several blockchains.

Machine-translated from French