Binance customers pull $4.72 billion after record hack as FBI blames North Korean hackers
Binance customers withdrew a net $4.72 billion after the exchange reopened following last week’s $6 billion hack, the largest in crypto history, as US investigators blamed North Korea’s TraderTraitor group for the theft.
Customers of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, withdrew a net $4.72 billion after the platform reopened following last week's record $6 billion hack, Reuters reported on Wednesday, in a striking test of confidence in the exchange just days after the largest heist in crypto history.
The withdrawals followed the phased resumption of services at the weekend. Binance said that between 6 a.m. and 3.30 p.m. GMT on Sunday it had processed $4.65 billion in withdrawals against $1.01 billion in deposits, according to The Citizen's account of the company's figures, a net outflow of $3.64 billion in that window alone, equal to about 2.1 per cent of the total assets the company manages. By Tuesday, Reuters reported, the cumulative net withdrawal figure had reached $4.72 billion.
The scale of the outflow is notable, but so is what it did not become. Binance has said that about 98 per cent of its user base stayed with the platform after the hack, and the company still reported total assets of about $157 billion even after the theft, the withdrawals and subsequent market moves, according to the New York Post's account. The exodus, in other words, was large in absolute terms but small relative to the exchange's overall balance sheet.
The hack itself took place on or about October 29, when attackers drained billions of dollars in virtual assets from a Binance-owned hot wallet in about 20 minutes, taking a mix of BNB, Bitcoin, Ether, USDT and USDC. Binance moved quickly with other exchanges and stablecoin providers to freeze about $3 billion of the stolen funds, mostly in stablecoins, and has said it will cover all customer losses in full from company funds.
Binance said on Saturday it had set aside more than $6.34 billion in company funds to cover the losses, drawing on its Secure Asset Fund for Users, its Futures Insurance Fund and corporate treasury reserves, and that about 98 per cent of the affected tokens had already been replenished by October 31, with the remaining, less liquid tokens taking longer to source at the required scale.
The investigation has now given the theft a named culprit. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement on Saturday that North Korea was responsible for the theft of more than $6 billion in virtual assets from Binance, confirming suspicions from private investigators. US law enforcement agencies and blockchain analysis firms have specifically linked the TraderTraitor group, also tracked as APT38, to the attack, the same group blamed for the $1.5 billion theft from Bybit in February last year.
Binance's own account of how the hackers got in reads like a social-engineering case study. The company said on Tuesday that North Korean hackers approached one of its engineers through a fake company, conducting a series of phony job interviews and using tampered software to hack the engineer's laptop, in a campaign that began as early as June. The stolen credentials were then used to fund and drain the company's internal wallet.
The market reaction has been mixed rather than catastrophic. Cryptocurrencies briefly dipped on Wednesday as the Democratic midterm sweep added to uncertainty over faster deregulation for digital assets, with Bitcoin touching a six-week low before recovering to trade roughly flat at about $78,070 by 7.15 a.m. GMT, according to Reuters, while Ether traded at about $2,292, up about 1 per cent. Bitcoin has fallen about 41 per cent from record highs above $122,000 in October 2025, and the market has lost about $300 billion in value in the last month alone, as concern about AI returns and higher borrowing costs pushed investors towards safer assets.
For the wider crypto industry, the episode is a reminder of two different risks at once. The first is security: even the largest exchange, with the deepest resources, can be breached through a single compromised employee device. The second is trust: customers showed they could move billions out within hours, and the exchange's ability to process those withdrawals, replenish stolen tokens and keep most users on board will shape how regulators and rivals judge its resilience.
What happens next will be watched on three fronts: whether investigators and exchanges can recover or freeze more of the stolen funds, whether Binance completes the replenishment of the remaining tokens and restores its safety fund to about $1 billion, and whether the outflows stabilise now that withdrawals have reopened fully. For now, the headline numbers tell the story of a record hack, a multi-billion-dollar customer exit, and an exchange still standing after both. Crypto market figures in this post are as reported on November 4, 2026, checked at about 11:30 p.m. PKT.
This post is market news information only, not financial advice.
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