About $6.3 billion left Binance in a single attack, and Bitcoin dropped under $77,000 within hours. The question traders are asking now is not how big the theft was, but whether the world's biggest exchange can still prove every customer's coins are fully backed.
Key points:
- Binance puts the hit at around $6.3 billion, and about $3 billion of it is already frozen with help from stablecoin issuers.
- The first checks point to a hacked engineer's laptop, not a leaked wallet key, and Binance says its probe is still open.
- Bitcoin slipped under $77,000, BNB fell more than 7%, and over $1.5 billion in trader positions got wiped out in a day.
Binance says its first look at the attack points to a DevOps engineer's laptop that had been hacked. From there, the attacker reached a service container and pushed through withdrawal orders the exchange never approved. On the chain, the trail runs through a wallet Binance calls Binance 14: the attacker used a new Ethereum feature, EIP-7702, to hand that wallet's control to a sweeper program, then moved about 204,500 ether out in chunks. Blockaid, a security firm that traced the moves, says it looks like the signing system itself was tricked, not that a private key leaked. Binance agrees so far, no key leak found, but it says the probe is still open.
Here is the part that worries traders most. That same Binance 14 wallet shows up in Binance's own October 1 proof of reserves, which means the stolen coins were part of the pile backing customer balances. On that date, Binance held just enough ether to cover its customers, no spare cushion, so losing 204,500 ether pulls its ether backing down to near 94%. Its next reserves snapshot lands on November 1, and that is the first hard test of whether the hole has been filled.
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Can Binance really cover a $6.3B hole?
Markets did not wait for answers. Bitcoin fell 4.5% in a day to $76,664, BNB dropped 7.1% to about $699, ether slid 5.2% to $2,190, and XRP lost 7% to $1.21. Liquidations hit $1.55 billion in 24 hours across 246,482 traders, most of them long bets, with the single biggest wipeout an $11 million Bitcoin order on Binance itself. My own read is plain: This sell-off says less about Binance and more about how jumpy the whole market already was. A calm market would have shrugged at a covered loss; this one was looking for a reason to fall.
Some of the money is already stuck. Binance says around $3 billion is frozen, with Tether freezing over $1.567 billion in USDT and Circle about $823 million in USDC, plus smaller freezes from Ripple and World Liberty Financial. Binance has paused deposits and withdrawals while it runs security checks, and its co-CEO Yi He says the exchange will cover every user loss, using its SAFU emergency fund and company money. What to watch next is simple: the November 1 reserves snapshot, whether the frozen total keeps growing, and the full post-mortem Binance has promised once the facts are checked.
Read also: Ledger Tampered Wallets Cost Singapore Users $2.7M — Police Issue Warning
— BitByLine News Desk
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Sources: The Block, CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, Decrypt