LONDON (The Thursday Times) — Binance began restoring withdrawals on Sunday after saying it had covered the bulk of the $6.3 billion in tokens stolen in Thursday’s hack, which the FBI has blamed on North Korea.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange said it had replaced more than 90 per cent of the stolen assets using its own corporate treasury and other funds, and had set aside more than $6.34 billion to cover the losses in full. The rest are less liquid tokens that may take longer to source in the amounts needed, it said.
“Binance will absorb the financial impact of these stolen funds, not our users,” the company said on Saturday. Withdrawals are coming back in phases, starting with bitcoin, ether, BNB, Solana, XRP and dogecoin, and were restored on several networks on Sunday. All holdings of bitcoin, ether and Tether are covered, along with seven other widely traded tokens.
The FBI said on Saturday that North Korea’s state-backed TraderTraitor unit carried out the attack. It said the hackers had been seen converting stolen assets into ether and that it expected further laundering through decentralised finance and instant swap services. Binance said on Friday it had frozen about $3 billion of the stolen assets with the help of law enforcement and partners, and the US Secret Service said it was working “around the clock” to trace and recover the funds.
The heist is the largest on record, eclipsing the $1.5 billion stolen from the Bybit exchange in 2025, which the FBI also blamed on North Korea. Binance first said an engineer’s laptop had been compromised, but later said it had found “additional points of breach”. Co-chief executive Richard Teng said more than one person was involved and that the hackers used methods such as a “self-destruct mechanism” to hide their tracks. Pyongyang has long denied running cyber units for theft.
