Stepping outside games into the tech industry: Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, is investigating a possible hack that, according to blockchain analytics firms, may have drained about $5.7 billion on Thursday, October 29. If confirmed at that size, it would be the largest crypto theft in history, ahead of the roughly $1.5 billion taken from Bybit in February 2025.
“Our teams are aware of reports of a possible security issue and are actively investigating,” Binance said, according to CoinDesk. Co-CEO Yi He said the company will cover “all losses from hacking” and that deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended. Founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) said “user funds are safe.”
The numbers come from people tracking wallets on-chain. Arkham data shows the wallet identified as the attacker’s holds about $1.5 billion in bitcoin, $900 million in ether and $1.4 billion in the USDT and USDC stablecoins. Chainalysis puts the total at $5.9 billion. On Ethereum, the Etherscan explorer already labels one of the addresses “Binance Hot Wallet Exploiter 2,” holding about $2.1 billion in tokens. According to the BBC, Binance has frozen $2.5 billion in assets, and NBC News reports that Tether and Circle, the stablecoin issuers, froze more than $1.5 billion.
How the attack happened: according to security firm Blockaid, in an analysis shared by International Cyber Digest, whoever emptied the Binance hot wallet had 50 authorizations signed with that wallet’s own private key. Under Ethereum’s EIP-7702 standard, such an authorization lets a wallet hand control of itself to code. Each one only works for one specific transaction number, and since the Binance wallet was still active, the attacker sent all 50 at once, in a single transaction confirmed at 5:20 p.m. Brasília time on October 29, in block 26,300,753; one matched and installed a contract that drained the wallet within minutes, taking $1.6 billion in USDT, 167,464 ETH and more than 60 other tokens. Only that key, or the system that holds it, can produce those signatures, and how the attacker obtained them is still unknown. Across Ethereum, Bitcoin and Tron, at least $5.57 billion left Binance-linked wallets. The company says user funds are “completely safe” but has not explained how.
Analysts cited by CoinDesk link the case to North Korea’s Lazarus group, but there is no official confirmation of who is behind it. In the market, bitcoin fell about 3% to $78,800, ether dropped 4% and BNB, Binance’s own token, lost 6.7%.
The situation is still developing: the information in this story was last updated at 10:30 p.m. Brasília time on October 29. We will update it as Binance confirms what happened and when withdrawals resume.
Source: CoinDesk, BBC, NBC News, Arkham, Chainalysis e Etherscan.
