MMMLargest Cryptocurrency Theft from Binance: Details and Outcomes
Hot wallets at Binance were drained of approximately $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency. This stands as the largest known theft of digital assets in industry history.
Analysts link the incident to North Korea, although there is currently no official confirmation from the country's authorities.
The main problem for the attackers was that $3.46 billion of the stolen funds were held in stablecoins. The issuers of these tokens have the ability to freeze assets.
The blocking process occurred in real time:
- Tether froze the main wallet 37 minutes after USDT arrival
- Circle froze $823 million in USDC three minutes later
- Ripple, World Liberty Financial, Paxos, and First Digital joined the freeze
Before the total freeze, hackers managed to swap about $786 million into ETH and TRX. For 448 million USDT, they acquired 160,451 ETH, losing between 12% and 26% relative to market price.
Part of the funds was used for lending: 60 million USDT were deposited into Aave to secure a loan of approximately $44.6 million.
Final losses are distributed as follows: $2.84 billion frozen, with hackers retaining approximately $3.23 billion in ETH, BTC, XRP, and TRX.
Binance plans to cover the losses using its SAFU fund and own resources. The freeze only blocks transactions and does not mean the return of funds to their owners.
