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Morning Edition · Monday, November 2, 2026Published at 12:15 AM EST · New York
Binance Users Withdraw $3.6 Billion After the $6.3 Billion Hack Investigators Blame on North Korea
Bitcoin trades near $78,000 after last week's slide, and BTCPay, a separate bitcoin payment tool, has told merchants to shut down their servers after reports of drained wallets.
Customers withdrew $3.6 billion from Binance after the exchange restarted services following the theft, the Financial Times reported. Binance has pledged to reimburse users whose assets were stolen. An attacker moved about $6.36 billion out of Binance's hot wallets across ten blockchains, most of it in about 20 minutes. News outlets including PBS describe it as likely the largest crypto theft on record. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attributed the attack to North Korea. The blockchain analytics firm TRM named TraderTraitor, which it describes as Pyongyang's elite hacking unit.
Binance says it has restored backing for 90% of affected assets and has resumed withdrawals in phases. With help from blockchain partners, it has frozen about $3 billion. The Argentine daily Clarín reconstructed the first 24 hours inside the exchange, describing a crisis meeting, a global conference call, and a founder who broadcast live as "the biggest crypto robbery in history" unfolded.
Prices have partly recovered. CoinDesk reported bitcoin moving back toward $79,000 on Monday, with the privacy coin Zcash posting the largest gain among major tokens. Coinbase data showed bitcoin near $77,990. Bitcoin fell on Friday along with technology stocks. A separate security problem emerged overnight: BTCPay, an open-source bitcoin payment processor, told users to switch off their servers after reports of drained wallets. The project has not given a loss figure or released a fix. Its founder said the reports appear to involve versions older than 2.4.2.
Part of a tracked trend
Bitcoin Trades as a Risk Asset, Not Digital Gold
At each geopolitical or inflationary stress point, bitcoin keeps trading with liquidity-sensitive risk assets rather than with monetary metals, so the digital-gold framing continues to fail exactly when investors most want it to hold.
Veracity: Corroborated
87/100- If true, who benefits
Licensed custodians and regulated rival exchanges gain from withdrawals and from stricter custody rules. Washington gains a fresh case for sanctions on North Korea and for tighter controls on decentralized-finance laundering routes.
- The nuance
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at first declined to name a culprit and then attributed the theft to TraderTraitor on October 31. No one has publicly explained how the attackers reached the hot wallets, and Binance's figure of 90% restored backing comes from Binance and has not been audited.
An open-source-intelligence read of how likely this story is true with its real nuance, not a judgment of any outlet. It assesses the claim, weighing independent and adversarial reporting. How we label confidence.
What this means
The hack exposes a weakness in exchange custody rather than in the bitcoin protocol itself, and the $3.6 billion in withdrawals shows users moving funds into their own wallets or to rival exchanges. That pressures Binance's trading volume and fee income more than it pressures bitcoin's price. The exposure that matters for markets is concentration: a state-backed group drained billions of dollars in minutes from the largest exchange, giving regulators in every major jurisdiction a concrete case for tighter custody rules, reserve audits and identity requirements. Those rules raise costs for offshore venues and favor licensed custodians. Bitcoin's own behavior also matters. It fell with tech stocks on Friday and recovered with them on Monday, while gold moved on a different pattern. In February 2025, Bybit replaced about $1.5 billion in stolen assets and kept operating, and the market treated it as a single-exchange event. The desk's forward read: the more likely outcome is that Binance survives without a run that spreads to other exchanges, while bitcoin keeps moving with the Nasdaq rather than with gold in the coming weeks. Withdrawals continuing at the current pace after reimbursement is complete, or a second major exchange breach, would prove that wrong.
Synthesized from: Financial Times Technology · Clarín (Economía) · CoinDesk · CoinDesk
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Comments
1Nov 2, 5:15 AM
Frozen funds cover about 47% of the $6.36 billion taken, so meeting the reimbursement pledge requires roughly $3.4 billion from Binance's own reserves unless more is recovered.