Cryptocurrency exchange Binance said Monday that it had obtained assets to cover about 95 percent of the $6.3 billion in digital currencies stolen in a dramatic heist by North Korean hackers on Thursday that amounted to the biggest crypto hack in history.
In the days since billions vanished from accounts — or wallets, in crypto speak — on the exchange, Binance has scrambled to reassure users that they will be made whole through a combination of its assets, an insurance fund and a strategic bitcoin reserve of $1 billion.
The company’s former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, also sought to calm user nerves.
“Trust isn’t earned by what you say in good times. It’s earned by what you do in hard times,” he posted on X on Sunday, as Binance ended a pause on withdrawals.
Zhao stepped down in 2023 after he pleaded guilty to violating criminal anti-money laundering guidelines in the United States. He was later pardoned by President Donald Trump and remains the company’s largest shareholder.
Despite the assurances, some users still wanted to pull their money out. In the first nine hours of withdrawals, Binance saw a net outflow of $3.6 billion, about 2 percent of the $171 billion in assets it manages.
Binance acts like a stock exchange and depository for cryptocurrency, where users can trade various digital assets such as bitcoin and then leave them for safekeeping.
The hackers swiped funds held in a variety of cryptocurrencies, including “stablecoins” — a digital dollar, typically generated from a central issuer, that is backed by an asset like the U.S. dollar.
After the attackers breached Binance, stablecoin companies froze about $3 billion in affected funds, preventing the hackers from laundering them further.
Binance also bought back a raft of cryptocurrencies in the markets and published proof based on cryptographically verified internal records and the public blockchain, the decentralized network on which cryptocurrency trades.
Cryptocurrency exchanges have been a frequent target of hacks by North Koreans and have not always been able to repay users afterward. WazirX, an Indian cryptocurrency exchange that was hacked in 2024 for almost half of its assets — about $234 million — was unable to fully cover its losses and underwent a restructuring.
Binance is the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange and has deep enough pockets to cover the losses. But cryptocurrency is a largely unregulated simulacrum of the normal financial system without safeguards like deposit insurance that are expected of banks. Much of the analysis of how the hack unfolded has been conducted by third parties examining the public flow of funds on the blockchain.
The FBI and third-party analysts have attributed the attack to the North Korean state hacker group TraderTraitor, which has been linked to previous record-breaking crypto hacks.
The hack comes amid fears that powerful artificial intelligence will wreak havoc on the internet by finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, although it’s not clear that the Binance hackers used AI.
Crypto security firms Elliptic and Chainalysis have observed that the attackers attempted to launder the funds by shuffling them around various wallets in apparently automated fashion, indicated by the speed and timing of transactions, which continued through the night in Pyongyang.
Still, there were some steps that looked like human decisions, Elliptic researcher Tom Robinson said in a blog post, such as small test transactions before larger moves were made.
The heist appears to be another example of cryptocurrency’s reputation as the financial wild west. But some in the industry are hopeful that it can be a lesson.
“The things that will continue to be targeted are financial infrastructure because hackers want to steal money and, specifically, digital assets. I also think this is a good thing for the industry, I will say,” said Ido Ben-Natan, the CEO of the crypto analyst company Blockaid. “It hardens us.”
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