Cryptocurrencies: Binance reports massive cyberattack, three billion dollars frozen

A vast cyber attack. Cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance announced Thursday that it had been the victim of a major hack. The damage is estimated at $6.3 billion, with half of the funds having been frozen to prevent massive theft.

Binance published several contradictory messages on the X platform, first assuring that all funds deposited by customers on its site were “totally safe”, before announcing, a little later, that it would cover “all losses”. The platform then indicated on its X account for Latin America that “the total amount impacted was approximately $6.3 billion.” All deposits and withdrawals suspended “We have worked with specialist blockchain partners to freeze the affected assets; approximately 3 billion dollars were frozen on-chain (blocked on the blockchain, N.

D.L.R.

) so far,” added the press release. This would be four times the amount stolen - to date the largest cyberattack of this type: $1.5 billion was siphoned off the Bybit platform in February 2025, a theft attributed to hackers affiliated with North Korea. Around 12:30 a.m. Friday, Binance announced that “all deposits and withdrawals” were “temporarily suspended.”

“This amount could continue to increase as our teams work closely with authorities, issuers, data analysis companies and industry partners to identify and freeze additional assets” that may have been targeted, Binance added. A loss of more than a billion dollars “This looks like a cyberattack on Binance,” commented on X Changpeng Zhao, former boss of the platform who no longer holds operational functions but still remains a majority shareholder of the group. He estimated that the losses linked to this assault could be “a little higher” than a billion dollars.

The boss of Tether, a company issuing in particular a cryptocurrency called USDT, the third digital currency by volume in circulation (approximately $180 billion), announced that it had frozen approximately $1.6 billion of these assets “in connection with a potential attack” on Binance. As for the CEO of Circle, which oversees the USDC cryptocurrency, he announced the immobilization of around $800 million.

Machine-translated from French