Hackers steal $6.3 billion from Binance in biggest-ever cryptocurrency theft

Binance said Friday that a security incident impacted about $6.3 billion in client assets, with around $3 billion frozen on-chain, marking the largest crypto hack on record.

The company later added it began recovering assets impacted by the breach after pledging to cover losses using its Secure Asset Fund for Users, which the company created in 2018 as a protection for clients in the event of a hack.

It wasn't clear how the attack took place. The world's largest crypto exchange initially said the hack may involve "a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions." However, Co-CEO Richard Teng later said the attack involved a more complex process rather than the misuse of a single engineer's permissions.

Binance temporarily suspended withdrawals while it overhauls its withdrawal security systems and has revoked the affected address authorizations, Teng said. The exchange is also working with law enforcement and blockchain intelligence firms to trace and recover the stolen funds, while deposits remain unaffected.

Binance co-founder Yi He said deposits remained unaffected and continued to operate normally, while the exchange was working on enhancements to its withdrawal service and related address controls. It expects to begin resuming withdrawal services within the next 48 hours.

"We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak. We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified," Binance said.

The announcement followed moves by several crypto firms, including Circle Internet Group , Tether and Ripple, to freeze funds tied to the hack.

Exploits are not uncommon in the crypto space. In 2025, Bybit suffered roughly $1.5 billion in losses due to a hack. More recently, Bitget lost more than $350 million worth of digital assets in a cyber theft incident. Over the past several years, bad actors have also drained billions of dollars in crypto from decentralized exchanges.