Crypto: Gate Freezes Two Accounts Linked to Binance Hack

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This freeze results from a public report. Lookonchain spotted a series of transfers to Gate deposit addresses, amounting to approximately $250,000 accumulated over twelve hours. The exchange immediately confirmed the blocking of two accounts linked to these inflows of funds.

Breaking into small deposits is the most common tactic of onchain laundering. Splitting a sum into payments of a few tens of thousands of dollars allows you to hope to fall below the thresholds which trigger a manual review by the platforms. On a centralized exchange, the exercise comes up against a simple limit. The accounts are custodial, the platform holds the keys and a compliance manager can block withdrawals in seconds. A self-hosted wallet does not freeze remotely.

For the attacker, going through Gate has an additional cost. Opening an account requires identity verification, or purchasing an already verified account on a parallel market. In both cases, the platform keeps IP addresses and identity documents which end up in the hands of investigators.

However, freezing an account remains a discretionary decision. The Bybit heist shook up practices. On February 21, 2025, the exchange lost approximately $1.46 billion in ether after signing a falsified multisig transaction. The FBI attributed the operation to the North Korean Lazarus group. Bybit and its partners then blocked several tens of millions of dollars from the platforms through which the funds passed.

Services that refuse to cooperate sometimes end up worse. eXch (instant exchange platform without identity verification) was used to recycle part of Bybit's loot and publicly refused to block anything. On April 30, the German federal police seized its servers and the equivalent of 34 million euros in cryptocurrencies.

Public registers in fact work for investigators. Every movement of the pirate is time-stamped and viewable by anyone, forever. A fraudulent bank transfer disappears into closed systems to which only a few regulators have access.

Since 2018, Binance has had a house insurance fund. Fueled by a share of trading fees, the SAFU (Secure Asset Fund for Users) reaches around one billion dollars placed in stablecoins. He had covered all of the 7,074 bitcoins stolen from the platform in May 2019 (which we recall were worth $40 million at the time, and several hundred million today).

The $250,000 tied up at Gate is only a fraction of the funds in motion. Above all, they open a door to investigators, who now have two identified accounts, their registration documents and the complete history of deposits. Lookonchain continues, like other specialists in the sector, to track down and publish the hacker's still active addresses.

Machine-translated from French