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News · Oct 30, 2026 · 4 min read

The Binance hack: $6.3 billion taken, $3 billion frozen, and 18,270 bitcoin that have not moved

Binance says hackers took about $6.3 billion on Thursday 29 October, the largest crypto theft on record, and that about $3 billion is frozen. The stolen bitcoin is sitting in 19 wallets. A machine mines the same coins today as it did on Wednesday.

Firsthand card: "The Binance hack: $6.3 billion taken, $3 billion frozen, and 18,270 bitcoin that have not moved", with the bitcoin price line of the last year

Binance says $6.3 billion was taken on Thursday

Binance estimates that about $6.3 billion of assets were stolen on Thursday 29 October, and Chainalysis put the figure near $5.9 billion at the time of the theft, according to CoinDesk's running report. CoinDesk says it surpasses the 2025 Bybit hack and calls it the biggest crypto hack in history. Binance held roughly $144 billion of assets before the theft, per DefiLlama, so the loss is about 4% of that.

Binance's first account is that the incident "may involve a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container." It also says: "We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak." Deposits and withdrawals are suspended while it investigates. Co-CEO Yi He said the exchange will cover "all hacking losses", with its roughly $1 billion SAFU reserve fund and company funds.

The largest theft in crypto history, and the first account of it is a laptop.

About half is frozen, and stablecoins are why

By late Thursday Binance said about $3 billion was frozen, including $2.3 billion in USDT and USDC. Tether's chief executive Paolo Ardoino said it had frozen more than $1.57 billion of USDT, and Circle's Jeremy Allaire said Circle froze more than $800 million of USDC, CoinDesk reported.

Arkham data showed the attacker's wallets at one point held over $5.7 billion: nearly $1.5 billion of bitcoin, $900 million of ether, about $1.5 billion of USDT and over $800 million of USDC. A stablecoin issuer can freeze its own token. Nobody can freeze bitcoin, which is why the bitcoin is the part to watch.

The bitcoin sits in 19 wallets and has not moved

The hacker took about 18,270 bitcoin, worth about $1.4 billion at Friday's prices, and split it across 19 wallets: seventeen hold exactly 1,000 bitcoin each, one holds 832.5 and one holds 437.7. As of 04:23 UTC on Friday none of them had sent a coin, according to CoinDesk's trace.

For scale, the network pays out 450 new bitcoin a day in block rewards, so 18,270 is about 41 days of everything miners produce. It is also 1.4% of the 1,296,242 bitcoin the US spot ETFs hold on our ETF holdings chart.

Analysts point to North Korea; nobody official has said so

TRM Labs traced the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean group, with "high confidence". Chainalysis said it "was likely done by DPRK group TraderTraitor", and ZachXBT called Lazarus the likely attacker, CoinDesk reported. A person familiar with crypto investigations told CoinDesk it was not definitively attributed yet, and that these groups usually move and sell stolen funds faster than this hacker has.

Bitcoin fell 4% and $1.5 billion of bets were closed

Bitcoin closed Thursday at $81,275 in our series and was at $77,990 on Friday, a drop of 4.0%. CoinDesk had it dipping toward $76,000 before recovering. The Fear & Greed Index on our chart went from 51 to 30 in a day.

Traders were forced out of $1.53 billion of leveraged positions in 24 hours, per CoinGlass figures in CoinDesk's liquidation report: $1.29 billion of them longs, and about $499 million of the total in bitcoin. Nearly half, $754.6 million, was on Binance itself.

Chart: Bitcoin's daily close since mid-September. The last point is Friday 30 October. Open the chart

What it means for miners

The theft changed the dollar price of a coin, not the number of coins a machine makes. Network hashprice was 0.000445 bitcoin per petahash a day on both Thursday and Friday on our hashprice chart. Difficulty rose 5.54% on Thursday to 148.36 trillion, the second rise in a row after 5.92% on 16 October, and that is what moves coins per machine.

On our best case, an Antminer S23 XP Hyd at 8.9 J/TH on Nigeria's 3.9¢ power, electricity makes a bitcoin for about $18,706 at today's hashprice. At $77,990 a coin costs 24% of its price to make, with the machine and pool fee left out and output not guaranteed. A miner's payout goes to the wallet address the owner sets, as our guide to wallet addresses and payouts explains.

A coin costs $18,706 to make. It was on the market for $77,990.

Sources and further reading

Disclosure

Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.