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More than $2 billion in cryptocurrency was withdrawn from Binance hot wallets on the evening of October 29 in what appears to have been a hacking attack. Some of the funds have already been frozen, and users have been promised full compensation.
The information was reported by Binance founder Changpeng Zhao on X, crypto publication BeInCrypto and blockchain data tracker Etherscan.
“User funds are SAFU! This does look like a Binance hack,” Zhao wrote.
He thanked Tether and Circle for quickly freezing the stolen stablecoins. Zhao clarified that he no longer runs Binance but, as a shareholder, expects the exchange to fully cover all customer losses.
Binance has not yet issued an official statement.
How much of the stolen cryptocurrency was frozen?
Tether froze approximately $971 million in USDT.
Circle froze approximately $823 million in USDC.
Together, the companies blocked nearly $1.8 billion of the withdrawn funds.
At 22:24 Kyiv time, 167,464 ETH, worth approximately $388 million, along with 63 other tokens — including around $1.6 billion in USDT — were transferred from Binance Wallet 14.
Twenty-four seconds later, another 28,005 ETH were sent from Binance Wallet 16 to the same recipient address.
The receiving address had been created earlier that day. Within 15 minutes, approximately $450 million worth of ETH was transferred from it to another newly created address.
Blockchain monitoring service Tree News estimated the total value of the withdrawn assets at $2.53 billion across more than 60 tokens.
On October 28, a day before the incident, Zhao had urged users not to open links in emails or download attachments. He warned that threats could even come from people they know whose computers had been infected with malware without their knowledge.
Changpeng Zhao founded Binance in 2017 but stepped down as CEO in 2023 as part of an agreement with US authorities. Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange and is widely used in Ukraine.
