OOOOOOOF HUGE news in the crypto space as CZ has even come out and said that Binance "may have been hacked," which honestly is not something I would have expected to be reading in 2026. According to a post from The Defiant citing numerous sources:
How Much Moved—and How Much Is Frozen?
The initial Binance 14 transaction, at 4:24 p.m. ET, moved 167,464.25 ETH and about 1.615 billion USDT to the collection address. Etherscan lists 63 ERC-20 token transfers in that transaction.
Just 24 seconds later, Binance 16 sent 28,005.6 ETH to the same recipient. Its token-transfer records also show about 55.74 million USDT and 25.94 million RLUSD moving there, alongside other tokens.
Hot Wallet 34 then sent 780 million USDC at 4:41 p.m. ET and another 43 million at 4:59 p.m. ET. Both transfers went to that collection address through calls to Binance 14.
Security firm Blockaid said the movements looked consistent with unauthorized transfers, but said it could not yet rule out an internal treasury or operational sweep.
Stablecoin issuers also intervened. A successful Tether transaction at 5:01 p.m. ET added the collection address to USDT's blacklist. A USDC transaction at 5:04 p.m. ET likewise blacklisted the same address.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company had frozen more than 1.567 billion USDT related to a potential Binance hack. @mattiascaricato put combined Tether and Circle freezes at roughly $2.4 billion. CZ, who said he no longer manages Binance, separately cited approximately $823 million frozen by Circle.
Ranges of the true damage and scale of the hack are currently still unclear, but multiple experts are placing the number at a whopping $5.5 BILLION, crushing the largest-ever hack of $1.5 billion a mind-boggling number, to be frank.
While USDC, USDT, and RLUSD have been frozen, crushing the hackers' ability to extract the true full value of the hack from those assets, the ETH that was sent through Tornado Cash is a different story. Binance is known to have an insurance policy, but that only goes up to a reported $1.2 billion, so looking at the $5.5 billion number and subtracting the centralized stablecoins freezing roughly $2 billion leaves an additional $3 billion plus that might have gotten tumbled and away.
I am not sure what type of reserve Binance has, but this will likely consume all of it, and they will have to raise more. This is the second significant hack today as Polymarket was hit earlier in the day but they were able to refund and start allowing trades again. Binance says user funds are safe and that they will resume some activity shortly but that is much harder to believe given the sheer scale.
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