The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, said $6.3 billion in funds were affected in what the industry is calling the largest crypto hack ever. Prices of digital tokens tumbled.
"The estimated impact of this security incident is about $6.3 billion," Binance said in a post on social media platform X. "The company has worked with blockchain partners to freeze the affected assets, and about $3 billion has now been frozen on-chain." Binance has suspended all deposit and withdrawal services. The company said it will bear all losses and that "user funds are safe and secure." Co-founder He Yi later posted on X that withdrawal services are expected to resume within the next 48 hours, adding that deposit services were unaffected and are still operating normally.
Before this, the largest publicly disclosed crypto hack occurred in February 2025, when attackers stole nearly $1.5 billion worth of tokens from the exchange Bybit. For crypto loyalists who had just enjoyed two straight months of price rebounds, the Binance incident could be a setback. Notorious thefts and frauds at former crypto giants such as FTX and Mt. Gox have in the past kicked off prolonged bear markets. The industry has been trying to shake off that history as U.S. President Donald Trump promises a new era of clearer crypto regulation.
Bitcoin fell 3% late in the U.S. trading session and dropped as much as another 3% during Asian trading, falling below $77,000 to touch its lowest level since September before paring losses; other tokens were also sold off. "The rumored Binance hack is undoubtedly weighing on coin prices," said Fredrick Collins, chief executive officer and co-founder of crypto data platform Velo Data. "Binance is a giant in crypto, and any blow to trust in the platform spills over into confidence across the entire industry, especially when people are already worried about AI's growing cyberattack capabilities."
Binance set up an emergency insurance and reserve fund called the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) in 2018, which the exchange says is designed to protect customers in "extreme situations." Binance said in 2024 that SAFU usually holds about $1 billion, though it has fluctuated with the market in the past. Two major stablecoin issuers said they had moved to freeze the missing funds. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino posted on X that the company froze more than $1.5 billion in stablecoins "related to a possible hack of the Binance exchange." Jeremy Allaire, head of Circle Internet Group Inc., said $800 million of the company's stablecoins had been frozen amid "reports of a possible Binance attack."
A string of crypto security incidents has already left market sentiment fragile. In recent months, hundreds of millions of dollars were stolen from Bitget, and tampering incidents linked to Ledger devices also caused millions of dollars in losses. Ari Redbord, global head of policy at blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs, said "attackers are moving at unprecedented speed and scale," but "so are the tools for tracking funds." "Stablecoin issuers freeze funds within hours. Investigators track money moving across blockchains in real time," he said.
Traders had already been preparing for potentially sharper volatility in the crypto market this week, with $11 billion worth of options set to expire on Friday. A few days later, the U.S. will hold midterm elections, when Democrats could win back control of one or both chambers of Congress, potentially increasing regulatory scrutiny of the industry.
Throughout crypto's nearly 20-year rise, exchange thefts and wrongdoing have been constant companions, most notably the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX in November 2022. Another hack that may remain the most notorious to date occurred in 2011, when Japan-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox was attacked. Over time, the tokens stolen by hackers have come to be worth billions of dollars at current market prices. Mt. Gox ultimately went bankrupt. "Successful hacks in this space keep happening and have done enormous damage to the crypto industry," said Tian Zeng, chief executive officer of crypto hedge fund Third Eye. "In an era when the latest AI models are released almost every two weeks, exploits keep happening, which makes the whole industry feel dangerous."
On the same day as the Binance incident, event contract trading platform Polymarket said its international exchange suspended trading for an hour after a third-party software vendor was compromised. Blockchain analytics platform Bubblemaps posted on X that more than 700 Polymarket users had a total of $2.7 million stolen. A spokesperson declined to comment on the figures. Recent security incidents have not been limited to crypto companies. Yonhap reported that South Korea's Daishin Securities disclosed a data breach this week affecting about 38,000 customers, and Mirae Asset Global Investments also reported a hack. In Japan, hackers threatened on Tuesday to publish data on traders using GMO Internet Group's cloud service for foreign exchange trading.
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