“It is very unlikely that these funds will be recovered”: crypto industry begins hunt for $3 billion in crypto that still remains in the hands of Binance exchange hackers

The hunt for stolen cryptocurrencies on the Binance platform has only just begun. This Thursday, the world's leading crypto exchange suffered a major cyberattack, with losses of more than $6.3 billion. To date, $3 billion has been frozen by several stablecoin issuers, including Tether (for $1.6 billion) and Circle (for $823 million).

These cryptos can thus be easily returned to Binance in order to reimburse its customers. However, there remains $3.3 billion worth of cryptos still in the hands of hackers, to be recovered. It is in this context that several specialized companies are trying to trace the movements of hackers on the blockchain, including the investigator ZachXTB, as well as the company Arkham Intelligence.

Following the Binance hack, the company created a page allowing real-time monitoring of the flow of cryptocurrencies stolen by the Binance hackers. She has already identified more than 70 addresses to which hackers sent stolen cryptos. This system will make it possible in particular to see if the funds land on a so-called centralized cryptocurrency platform (CEX), allowing them to be frozen and then returned.

For example, Arkham Intelligence spotted that Binance hackers sent $38.82 million in ether to a new wallet. “Is this Tornado Cash? It still holds $1.12 billion in ETH,” the company asks.

However, not everything is so simple, especially coming from a hacker who managed to seize more than $6 billion worth of cryptos. In fact, the hackers seem to have created transition addresses “to muddy the waters before it goes to a final mixer,” Artem Sinyakin, head of OAK Research, a crypto research and intelligence platform, explains to BFM Crypto, citing Tornado Cash and Thorchain in this regard. Overall, hackers will first go through mixers (which erase all traces of transactions on the blockchain) before potentially laundering them.

“Very unlikely that these funds will be recovered” “However, it is very unlikely that these funds will be recovered because the North Korean actor to whom this hack is attributed is very sophisticated in money laundering and is not his first attempt,” indicates the expert. In fact, several analysts already attribute this theft to hackers from North Korea, reminiscent of the hack that occurred in 2025 on the cryptocurrency exchange platform Bybit that the FBI had attributed to Pyongyang. So should we think the worst?

As it is the world's largest crypto exchange, "the efforts to find the funds will be multiplied by 1,000", continues the expert. To date, Binance assures that it will cover “all losses” of users, in particular by activating its fund which represents 1 billion dollars in .

Machine-translated from French