Binance has disclosed a security breach with an estimated impact of $6.3 billion, after suspicious withdrawals led the cryptocurrency exchange to halt deposits and withdrawals on October 29. In an update the following day, Binance said around $3 billion of the affected assets had already been frozen with help from other crypto companies. The exchange insists customer funds are safe and has promised to cover every loss, though the final financial hit is still being worked out.
Early findings point to a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer, which the attackers may have used to get into a service container and push through unauthorized withdrawal transactions. Binance says it has found no sign that wallet private keys were leaked. It hasn’t yet explained how the laptop was compromised or given a full breakdown of the transactions, and plans to publish a technical report once the investigation wraps up.
Tether, Circle, and Ripple all stepped in to freeze assets tied to the breach. Tether locked more than $1.5 billion in USDT, Circle froze over $800 million in USDC, and Ripple froze around $200 million, which took the confirmed total past $2.5 billion by late Thursday before Binance raised its own estimate to roughly $3 billion. Frozen tokens can’t be moved any further, but that doesn’t settle how much Binance will actually get back.
The affected address has had its authorisation revoked, and Binance is working with law enforcement and blockchain intelligence firms to trace where the money went. Deposits and withdrawals were suspended while security checks ran, and there’s still no firm date for normal service to return. Binance.US, which runs separately from the international exchange, said it wasn’t affected.
Reimbursements will come out of Binance’s Secure Asset Fund for Users, or SAFU, along with the company’s own money. SAFU was set up as an emergency reserve to protect customers from exceptional losses, and Binance’s published figures put it at around $1 billion in January 2026, so the company’s own resources would have to cover any unrecovered losses above that. Binance also plans to publish updated Proof of Reserves once its security work is finished, giving customers a way to check the assets backing their balances.
A confirmed $6.3 billion impact would make this far bigger than the $1.5 billion stolen from Bybit in February 2025, which had been the largest confirmed crypto theft until now. The news hit prices quickly, with Bitcoin dropping to around $77,600 and Binance’s BNB token falling more than 8% in the immediate aftermath. How big the losses end up being still depends on how much investigators manage to recover.
Polymarket was hit by a separate security breach on the same day, after a third-party software provider was compromised. The prediction market briefly suspended trading on its international platform before bringing operations back and promising to reimburse affected users. Nothing so far links the two attacks, and Binance hasn’t named anyone responsible for its breach or released its full technical findings.