Binance was hit by a $6.3 billion hack. Here is what is verified.

Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, was hacked on Thursday, October 29. Binance puts the total impact at about $6.3 billion. The BBC says it is thought to be the largest hack of its kind in history. Chainalysis estimates the theft at about $6.4 billion.

How fast. Most of the money left Binance wallets in about 20 minutes, starting at 20:05 GMT on Thursday (1:05 p.m. PT), Ari Redbord of blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs told the BBC. He says an "operator wallet" had been funded 36 hours earlier.

How it happened, so far. Binance's first update said the incident "may involve a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop," which let an attacker reach a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawals. It says it found "no evidence of any wallet private key leak." Co-CEO Richard Teng later said the attack was "not carried out by one person," involved "additional points of breach," and abused EIP-7702 to get on-chain approval over a hot wallet, so the transfers "did not pass through our normal approval controls." A full post-mortem is still to come.

The numbers Binance has confirmed.

• About $3 billion of the stolen assets has been frozen on-chain with help from industry partners.
• Binance says it has reserved "over $6.34B of company funds" to cover the incident, $5 billion of it already held in the same tokens that were taken. It is buying the rest through market and OTC trades, which it warns can take longer for low-liquidity tokens.
• The frozen $3 billion is not counted in that reserve.
• Deposits work. Withdrawals are still paused while the withdrawal service is rebuilt; Teng said Binance is "on track" to resume within 40 hours. Binance says it will publish updated Proof of Reserves.

Who did it. No one has confirmed it. TRM Labs says it has "high confidence" that the North Korean group TraderTraitor, also known as Lazarus, is responsible, and Chainalysis says it has a "high degree of confidence" North Korea was behind it. North Korea has always denied such hacks. The FBI says it is "aware of the incident," and the US Secret Service says it is working to "identify, freeze, trace, and recover" the funds.

The Musk part. Elon Musk posted "Everyday is Zeroday" above a breaking-news alert about the hack, then replied to Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao with emojis. Zhao answered: "Elon, have a lot of respect for you, but bad time to troll. Please stop." He added that Binance's SpaceX shares, from its $500 million investment in Musk's Twitter takeover, "are worth more than a billion."

The catch. Binance did not say it will sell those SpaceX shares. Co-founder and co-CEO Yi He wrote that "our company's revenue for the year is sufficient to cover the losses, so we do not yet need to sell the SpaceX shares." Zhao later said he never said anything about selling them.

Our take. The blockchain was not broken. One company's internal approval path was, and the way in reportedly started with an engineer's laptop. If you build tools that can move money or ship code, the takeaway is to treat developer machines and signing permissions as production systems. Not investment advice.

MODEL Editors