Binance has already refunded 90% of the $6.3bn that suspected North Korean hackers stole from it in just 20 MINUTES
Binance halted all withdrawals after a hack through a single engineer's laptop drained an estimated $6.3bn — surpassing the previous record $1.5bn Bybit breach in 2025.Kim Jong Un, whose country's TraderTraitor unit carried out the Binance raid using access gained through a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, according to investigators.
Stablecoin issuers Circle and Tether moved first, locking up $2.4 billion in stolen funds within an hour of the attack — the fastest and largest asset-recovery operation blockchain experts say they have ever seen. Binance has drawn more than $6.34 billion from its own corporate reserves to cover all user losses, with withdrawals expected to resume by Sunday.
North Korea's elite 'TraderTraitor' unit is believed to have used a Binance engineer's laptop as the initial entry point to breach the exchange's hot wallets.
Ripple and World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto venture, joined the recovery effort by freezing stolen assets.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has previously served jail time after the exchange faced accusations of facilitating drug traffickers, terrorists and money launderers.
