Binance says it lost about US$6.3 billion on 29 and 30 October 2026, and paused deposits and withdrawals. Its first check points to one DevOps engineer's laptop as the way in. TRM Labs names North Korea's TraderTraitor group, the group the FBI named for Bybit's $1.5 billion loss in February 2025.
About $3 billion of the stolen coins were frozen on-chain: Tether froze over $1.5 billion of USDT, and Circle $800 million of USDC. Binance says it will cover all losses. Its SAFU reserve fund held about $1 billion at its 2024 disclosure.
In Thailand, Binance TH (Gulf Binance, licensed by the SEC) paused crypto withdrawals, while baht deposits, baht withdrawals and trading kept running, Thansettakij reported. The Thai SEC said it had found no significant impact on Thai customers' assets so far, and told licensed firms to check and report. Bitcoin traded under $77,000.
Speed: hours
A theft like this is a step, not a slope: trust falls in hours and comes back over weeks or years. Mt. Gox repayments began in 2024, ten years after its 2014 collapse; FTX began repaying customers in 2025, over two years after its 2022 bankruptcy. The freezes show the other side of stablecoins: one company can stop any USDT address.