Binance says about $6.3 billion of assets were affected in a breach it disclosed on Thursday, which would make it the largest crypto theft on record, CoinDesk reports. The previous benchmark was the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in 2025.
Outside counts run lower. Chainalysis put the haul at roughly $5.9 billion, Arkham at $6.01 billion, and an on-chain tally cited by Decrypt at about $5.57 billion, depending on which chains and assets are included.
Binance first pointed to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop and said it had found no leaked wallet private key. It has since said its investigation turned up “additional points of breach”, without naming them. Withdrawals remain suspended while it reworks the withdrawal service, though deposits have reopened.
Freezes did much of the early work. Binance says about $3 billion has been frozen on-chain, including more than $1.567 billion of USDT that Tether froze and more than $800 million of USDC that Circle froze.
Co-founder Yi He has said user funds are safe and that Binance will cover all hacking-related losses. Changpeng Zhao, now a shareholder rather than chief executive, said he expects customers to be made whole.
Attribution is unsettled. Blockchain sleuths cited by CoinDesk suspect North Korea’s Lazarus Group, but Binance has not named anyone. Bitcoin fell to about $77,000 and leveraged liquidations reached roughly $1.5 billion.
A full post-mortem is promised, along with an updated proof of reserves once remediation is done. Until then the final loss and the attack path are both open. The $6.3 billion is an estimate that three other counts do not match, and the pledge to cover it has not yet been tested.
