Morning Edition · Saturday, October 31, 2026
Crypto
Binance traces $6.3 billion theft to one engineer's hacked laptop as investigators name North Korea's TraderTraitor
About $3 billion of the stolen assets is frozen, Binance has set aside $6.34 billion of its own funds, and the exchange plans to restart withdrawals on Sunday and publish proof of reserves on Monday.
Crypto
EIP-7702 delegation let the Binance attacker sweep about $2.5 billion on Ethereum, and researchers propose narrower signing rules
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson called the sweeper code "seriously dangerous." On the same day, Ethereum researchers posted drafts for short-lived, purpose-limited authorization and for wallet simulations that third parties can check independently.
Crypto
Issuers freeze about $3 billion of Binance loot as the attackers switch to automated laundering that Chainalysis says it has not seen before
The attackers swapped $325 million of stablecoins for $285 million of ether. They gave up about $40 million to move into an asset no issuer can block.
Crypto
Aave reopens markets it froze after the Binance attacker borrowed 19,762 wrapped ether against stolen USDT
LlamaRisk kept nine assets held by the attacker's addresses, including USDT and USDC, at zero borrowing power and cut idle borrowing capacity on Aave V3 by about $3.7 billion.
Crypto
Lummis says the stalled CLARITY Act would have sped up Binance freezes, while a critic says it would have required court orders
Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chairman Michael Selig used the hack to offer offshore exchanges a federal registration path, and President Trump said the administration is looking into the theft.
Crypto
Aztec discloses a critical flaw in its Alpha V5 proving system that left the network unable to tell which transactions it should have rejected
An AI-assisted internal audit found the bug on July 27, and the fix ships in V6. Aztec has also declared its Noir circuit language stable at version 1.0 and set a 2030 target for post-quantum migration.
Crypto
Bridge and vault exploits cost zkLink Nova, an Avalanche tranche vault and Initia about $4.5 million combined
A reused message hash, a double-draw in share accounting and a caching bug in Initia's Move virtual machine each produced withdrawals or tokens that the systems should have rejected.
Crypto
Trezor tells buyers from reseller CryptoBilis to move funds after a report of a cellular implant inside a Safe 5
The reported implant reads the recovery words shown on the screen and sends them over a mobile network. Trezor has not yet examined the device, but says waiting for lab confirmation would leave buyers exposed.
Crypto
Miden launches its "PriFi" private-finance stack and a Bread wallet that shows the chain only a 32-byte commitment per transaction
Users execute and prove transactions on their own devices, and a Guardian layer adds account recovery, multisignature control and what Miden calls configurable compliance.
Crypto
Polymarket launches 15-minute gold and silver price markets worldwide, with Chainlink as its oracle
The prediction market extends its short-duration price contracts from cryptocurrencies to precious metals, offering hourly and daily markets as well as 15-minute ones.
Crypto
Tether earns $1.5 billion in the third quarter and nearly doubles its reserve buffer to $7.95 billion
The issuer holds $132.4 billion of US Treasuries. In a parallel test of tokenized cash, Uber earned 1.5 extra days of yield by keeping corporate cash invested over a weekend through HSBC tokenized deposits on Canton.
Markets
Bitcoin falls to about $76,000 and liquidations reach $1.57 billion as the Binance theft and a Nasdaq sell-off hit together
Spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds took in $440.8 million over four sessions before the sell-off, while Coinbase missed revenue estimates as monthly users fell to 7.4 million.