I have seen a lot of scary headlines in crypto. Exchange collapses, rug pulls, frozen withdrawals, market crashes—after a while, they start to blur together. But the Binance hack felt different the moment the number appeared - 

Not $63 million. Not $630 million. $6.36 billion.

Lets cover in detail what really happened and how a major company, like Binance, got hacked. Strap in, you're in for a ride! 

THE SUSPICIOUS AUTHORIZATION

• The attack reportedly began on Thursday, October 29, when Binance detected unauthorized withdrawals from its hot wallets. The company estimated the impact at around $6.3 billion, with funds moved across multiple blockchains within a few hours.

• Binance initially said the incident may have involved a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop. Later, the company said the attack was more complex, involving additional breach points, malicious software, and manipulation of transaction-approval controls.

• This matters because exchanges rely on internal systems, employee access, hot wallets, cold storage, and approval processes. If attackers compromise the people or systems responsible for approving withdrawals, they can move funds before security teams can respond.

WHO DID THE ATTACK?

• The FBI linked the attack to North Korean hackers, specifically the group known as TraderTraitor. The same group was linked to the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in the previous year.

• The FBI also warned that stolen assets could be laundered through Ethereum, DeFi protocols, bridges, and instant-swap services. Blockchain transactions are public, but criminals can still make tracing difficult by moving funds through many layers.

MARKET REACTION TO THE HACK

• The news hit the market quickly. Bitcoin fell toward the mid-$70,000 range, Ethereum also dropped sharply, and BNB fell nearly 10% before markets attempted to recover.

• The reaction was understandable. Binance is one of crypto’s main liquidity hubs. When users hear that billions were stolen from Binance, they worry not only about Binance but about exchange security across the industry.

BINANCE'S RESPONSE SO FAR

• Binance paused withdrawals, launched an internal security review, and said it would cover user losses using company funds. The company worked with blockchain partners to freeze roughly $3 billion of the affected assets.

• By October 31, Binance said it had replenished about 90% of the stolen assets. It used corporate funds, part of its Futures Insurance Fund, and a partial deployment of its SAFU emergency reserve. The remaining 10% involved less liquid tokens that may take longer to replace.

• Binance also took a new proof-of-reserves snapshot and said major assets, including BTC, ETH, USDT, BNB, SOL, USDC, XRP, USD1, RLUSD, and ZEC, are backed 1:1. Withdrawals were expected to resume on November 1.

THE STABLECOIN FACTOR

• Tether froze about $1.6 billion in USDT connected to the incident, while Circle froze more than $800 million in USDC. Together, that is roughly $2.4 billion in stablecoins frozen.

• This likely limited the hackers’ ability to move funds. But it also showed that stablecoins are not fully decentralized. If issuers can freeze assets during a crisis, users should understand that stablecoins come with issuer control and issuer risk.

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Thats it for now! More news and updates will follow as soon as they get public. Next part will get into detail of technicalities of how it went down, what was exploited exactly and how are investigators having a hard time tracing such large transactions.

Thank you for your time reading this far! Very much appreciated!

All the sources of this blog have been posted below for further readings

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