Binance says $6.3 billion hack linked to North Korea’s TraderTraitor, with $3 billion frozen

Binance says the estimated total impact of the hack is around $6.3 billion, while the verified total value of crypto frozen is $3 billion. For PSPs, exchanges, and custodians, the useful bit is not the headline number so much as the operational detail: withdrawals are paused, deposits are running, and investigators are still tracing assets.

1. Binance said withdrawals are expected to resume within 48 hours, while deposits remain operational. The exchange said its security team is tracing the full attack path through a compromised computer, which it suspects was the entry point.
2. The assets frozen so far include Tether USDt (USDT), USDC (USDC), Ripple USD (RLUSD), World Liberty Financial USD (USD1), StraitsX USD (XUSD), USDT0 (USDT0), Wrapped Beacon ETH (WBETH), Tether Gold (XAUT), Pax Gold (PAXG), Pax Dollar (USDP) and Arbitrum (ARB). Binance said the verified frozen amount is $3 billion, and that figure could rise as investigators trace additional assets.
3. Cybersecurity analysts suspect North Korea’s TraderTraitor is behind the attack. Chainalysis co-founder and CEO Jonathan Levin said the hack was likely carried out by TraderTraitor, putting the theft at $6.4 billion and saying industry partners had frozen approximately $3 billion. Chainalysis said it continues to track the funds.
4. Onchain investigator ZachXBT said the stolen funds from the Binance attack and the earlier Bitget exploit were commingled in the same address after arriving via THORChain. He said that points to the same actor being behind both incidents. He also noted that the Bitget exploit was attributed to DPRK-linked TraderTraitor and had overlap with earlier exploits such as Kelp DAO.
5. Blockaid co-founder and CEO Ido Ben-Natan told Cointelegraph the attack resembled North Korean activity because of the onchain preparation, customer sweeper contract, and multiple authorizations. TRM Labs also attributed the attack to TraderTraitor with “high confidence,” saying that assessment was based on “robust on and off-chain intelligence.” The FBI has previously named TraderTraitor as the group responsible for the ByBit hack in February last year.

Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, Geoffrey Kendrick, said the Binance hack could push more crypto trading toward decentralized exchanges and benefit Uniswap over the longer term. He kept his $100 price target for Uniswap’s UNI token by 2030.