Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said Thursday it’s investigating reports of a potential security issue as its founder said the incident “does look like a hack on Binance.” The company said late Thursday the estimated total impact was at more than $6 billion, which could be one of the most significant of such security incidents on record.
It wasn’t immediately clear the extent of the damage hackers might have been able to cause, but the cryptocurrency exchange said Friday that deposits and withdrawals have been suspended while it works with law enforcement, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to secure its infrastructure and locate stolen funds.
“The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B,” Binance said late Thursday on X. The company said $3 billion of affected crypto assets that transited through wallets connected to the hackers have so far been identified and frozen.
“We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak,” it added.
It said it will cover all losses.
The company said on X Friday that an initial investigation suggested the incident may have involved a compromised laptop, but that a subsequent investigation uncovered additional “points of breach.”
“Our security teams are reviewing all relevant information with urgency, and we will provide updates through official Binance channels as soon as we have verified information,” a Binance spokesperson said in a statement.
TRM, A U.S.-based blockchain intelligence firm, attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, which it described as North Korea’s elite hacking unit. “We make this judgment with high confidence,” the firm said in a post on its website Thursday.
“An attacker moved approximately USD 6.36 billion out of Binance wallets on ten blockchains, most of it in about 20 minutes,” TRM said. That would make the hack the largest cryptocurrency theft on record, it said.
Stablecoin providers Tether and Circle each said they froze funds Thursday in response to the incident.
Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of Circle, wrote on X that the company had frozen the equivalent of more than $800 million in currency associated with the incident “in coordination with law enforcement.” Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on X that the company froze the equivalent of more than $1.5 billion in currency related to “a potential Binance exchange hack.”
The price of bitcoin dropped 3.2% Thursday evening to under $79,000.
Binance was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao, who in 2023 pleaded guilty to a felony related to his failure to prevent money laundering on the platform and stepped down as CEO. President Donald Trump pardoned him in 2025.
Zhao posted on X on Thursday that “User funds are safe!” but added that the incident “does look like a hack on Binance.” He added that while he doesn’t manage Binance anymore, “as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered.”
Zhao was released from prison last year after being sentenced for violating the Bank Secrecy Act. He was the first person ever sentenced to prison time for violations of that law, which requires U.S. financial institutions to know who their customers are, to monitor transactions and to file reports of suspicious activity. Prosecutors said no one had ever violated the regulations to the extent Zhao did. Zhao and Binance have been key supporters of some of the Trump family’s crypto enterprises.
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AP writers Chan Ho-him and Barbara Ortutay contributed.
