World’s biggest crypto exchange reports 6.3 billion dollars impacted after hack

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, said it is investigating reports of a potential security issue, as its founder said the incident “does look like a hack on Binance”.

The company said the estimated total impact was at more than 6 billion dollars, which could be one of the most significant security incidents on record.

It wasn’t immediately clear the extent of the damage hackers might have been able to cause, and Binance had not explicitly confirmed that funds had been pilfered.

The company said its teams are “working around the clock” to resolve the issue.

A Binance spokesperson said: “Rest assured that user funds are completely safe.

“Our security teams are reviewing all relevant information with urgency, and we will provide updates through official Binance channels as soon as we have verified information.”

The company wrote on its X account that the estimated total impact sat at around 6.3 billion dollars.

It said it has worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with roughly 3 billion dollars frozen on-chain so far.

“Binance’s initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions,” the company wrote.

“We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak,” it added.

Binance said it will share more technical details once the investigation is complete and when the facts are “fully verified.”

“Our teams work closely with law enforcement, issuers, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to trace and freeze additional assets,” the company wrote in a separate post.

Binance also said all deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended while it conducts security checks, freezes funds and works with law enforcement.

Stablecoin providers Tether and Circle each said they froze funds in response to the incident.

Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and chief executive of Circle, wrote on X that the company had frozen the equivalent of more than 800 million dollars in currency associated with the incident “in co-ordination with law enforcement”.

Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino said on X that the company froze the equivalent of more than 1.5 billion dollars in currency related to “a potential Binance exchange hack”.

The price of bitcoin dropped 3.2% Thursday evening to under 79,000 dollars.