Hackers Pulled $6.3 Billion Out of Binance in About 20 Minutes. It Is the Biggest Crypto Theft Ever.

Song "BLUE CHAIN HEIST" — West Coast G-funk, three minutes eight, one story.

On Thursday, October 29, 2026, Binance — the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume — halted deposits and withdrawals after attackers took about $6.3 billion out of its wallets 1. Reuters puts the estimated impact at $6.3 billion and calls it the biggest crypto heist ever 2. TRM Labs, a US blockchain analysis firm, estimates the total at about $6.36 billion, taken across ten blockchains, most of it in roughly twenty minutes 3. Elliptic says almost all of it went in the first thirty minutes, and Chainalysis says the hackers moved the money using automated laundering patterns it had not seen before 4. Onchain data cited in the reporting shows about $3.55 billion in incoming transfers to one unlabelled wallet, with nearly $900 million moved on across other wallets 3.

TRM Labs attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, described as a North Korea-based group, and said it had high confidence, based on features of the hack that resembled previous thefts; TRM estimated the hackers had shifted about $2.4 billion beyond any issuer's reach 1.

Binance's first explanation was a compromised DevOps laptop. On Friday the company said its follow-up investigation had uncovered "additional points of breach", and called the incident "a complex attack" carried out with law enforcement coordination 1. Founder Changpeng Zhao, posting on X, said the incident "does look like a hack" 1.

What stopped some of it: Tether froze more than 1.5 billion USDT and Circle froze more than 800 million USDC, and Binance says about $3 billion has been located with partners, with no update on the rest 3. Both companies issue their own tokens and can stop a balance at an address they name; coins already swapped into another asset, or pushed through a mixer or a bridge, sit outside that reach. Reuters reports that Binance said it would cover "all hacking losses" 2, and that it had reserved more than $6.34 billion in company funds, including $5 billion already held in the impacted token assets 4. Co-founder Yi He said the company would cover all the losses 2.

For scale, the previous record was $1.5 billion taken from exchange Bybit in February 2025 out of a cold wallet used for ether. Before that: Poly Network at $610 million in August 2021, Ronin Network at about $540 million in March 2022, Coincheck's $530 million in January 2018, Mt. Gox at close to $500 million between 2011 and 2014, and Wormhole at $320 million in February 2022 2.

Binance.US said it was unaffected 4. Nobody outside Binance has published how the balances were actually reached, and no arrest or charge has been announced.

Reporting cut off at October 30, 2026. The next episode is whatever Binance says about the additional points of breach, or what the analysis firms trace next.