Binance says it has covered 90% of losses from record crypto hack

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, says it has covered 90 percent of the $6.3 billion in assets stolen in a hack that the FBI has attributed to North Korea. The exchange said on Saturday that the remaining 10 percent could take longer to source in the required amounts, but repeated its commitment to cover all customer losses. Binance said it had replenished the stolen assets using company funds and its corporate treasury.

It has set aside more than $6.34 billion for the losses and said the financial impact would be absorbed by the company rather than its users. The covered assets include bitcoin, ethereum, Tether and seven other widely traded cryptocurrencies. The FBI said North Korea was responsible for the attack.

Two analytics firms previously told the BBC that their intelligence pointed to the Lazarus Group, also known as TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-backed hacking unit named by the FBI. The Guardian separately reported that TRM, Elliptic and Chainalysis had attributed the attack to the group with high confidence. North Korea has denied involvement in such attacks.

Binance initially said an engineer’s laptop may have been compromised, allowing unauthorised withdrawals through one of its systems. The company later said it had found “additional points of breach”. Richard Teng, a Binance co-chief executive, said the hackers had used sophisticated methods to conceal their activity, including what he described as a self-destruct mechanism.

The investigation is continuing. The exchange said about $3 billion of the stolen funds had been frozen by Friday through cooperation with law-enforcement agencies, intelligence firms and industry partners. The US Secret Service said it was working to identify, freeze, trace and recover the assets.

The Guardian reported that Tether had frozen nearly $1.57 billion linked to the incident and Circle had frozen more than $800 million. The scale of the theft has produced differing descriptions in the supplied reports. The BBC called it possibly the biggest hack in crypto history, while The Guardian described it as the largest heist of any kind in history, citing Elliptic’s chief scientist.

Both reports said it surpassed the $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit exchange in 2025, which the FBI also attributed to North Korea. Binance temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while its security teams checked wallet infrastructure and traced affected assets. The company said it remained on course to reopen withdrawals on Sunday, November 1, although it said a further update would be issued once the details were confirmed.

The exchange did not say in the supplied material that all services had already resumed. The incident has also affected the broader crypto market. The Guardian reported that bitcoin fell 5 percent in early Asian trading after news of the hack, reaching $77,380, its lowest level in six weeks.

Analysts cited by the newspaper said the breach could reduce risk appetite and prompt investors to reassess the safety of assets held on centralised exchanges. Binance has an estimated hundreds of millions of users worldwide, while The Guardian cited 335 million registered users and $162.8 billion in assets under custody in its 2025 annual report.