Binance Freezes $3 Billion as Its Estimated Impact Reaches $6.3 Billion

Binance, which says it has more than 335 million registered users, suspended all deposits and withdrawals on Thursday, October 29, after users reported funds leaving its crypto wallets. 

Late that day, it published its first estimate of the damage. Binance describes $6.3 billion as an estimated total impact, not a confirmed loss, puts verified frozen assets at about $3 billion so far, and has not said how much remains unaccounted for. 

Binance’s own updates agree on the pause, while the numbers around it kept shifting. 

Binance’s Impact Estimate Landed About $5.8 Billion

The first numbers came from TechCrunch, which put at least $2 billion drained from the exchange’s hot wallets, plus CoinDesk estimates something near $5.7 billion, all unverified. 

Binance’s $6.3 billion sits above that whole range, and it is an estimate of impact rather than an audited loss. 

For scale, TechCrunch notes that the record exchange theft before this was the $1.4 billion taken from Bybit in 2025, blamed on North Korean hackers, who now run local AI tools to power cyberattacks. 

Binance’s figure is more than four times that, although one is a confirmed theft and the other an estimate. 

Binance’s statement gives no breakdown of how it reached its figure, and TechCrunch noted the theft might still have been under way when it reported. 

Tether and Circle Froze More Than $2.38 Billion 

Stablecoin issuers did much of the freezing, and their totals kept climbing. Reuters reported that Tether froze nearly $1.57 billion and Circle more than $800 million on Thursday, over $2.38 billion in all. 

Tether’s total was about $971 million when Binance founder Changpeng Zhao posted about the incident on X. 

Circle’s count stayed near $800 million throughout, and chief executive Jeremy Allaire wrote on X that the company was tracking reports of a potential exploit and would support the investigation. 

Binance’s verified total of about $3 billion does not say who froze what, and the company says it is still tracking and freezing more with law enforcement, token issuers, and on-chain intelligence firms. 

Binance.US said it was not affected.

Binance Pledges to Cover All Losses, But With a Catch

Binance says user funds are safe and that it will cover all losses from its Secure Asset Fund for Users, known as SAFU, and company funds, without giving a split. 

It has promised an updated Proof of Reserves once the incident is resolved, but no date for that or for reopening deposits and withdrawals. 

Its early investigation suggests a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop let an attacker reach a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawals, with no evidence that wallet private keys leaked. 

Binance has not called the incident a hack. But Zhao, who no longer manages the exchange, has said: “It does look like a hack on Binance.” 

That leaves four open questions: the final loss, the SAFU share, the confirmed cause, and when trading resumes. 

Source: Binance pauses withdrawals as hackers suspected of stealing billions in crypto