UPDATED: BINANCE PUTS THE DAMAGE AT $6.3 BILLION — IT POINTS TO A COMPROMISED DEVOPS LAPTOP, NO KEY LEAK FOUND — EVERY WITHDRAWAL IS PAUSED, BITCOIN INCLUDED
UPDATE, October 30, 2026: At 10:23 PM ET on October 29, Binance said its “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 unauthorized withdrawal transactions.” It found “no evidence of any wallet private key leak,” put the estimated total impact at “around $6.3B,” and said about $3 billion is frozen on-chain. It will cover losses from its SAFU fund and company funds, and it has “temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals.” At 1:15 AM ET on October 30, Binance’s network list showed withdrawals off on all 1,447 networks, bitcoin and Lightning included.
At 4:24 PM ET on October 29, 2026, one Ethereum transaction moved 167,464 ETH and 63 tokens out of the wallet Etherscan labels Binance 14. At Blockscout’s prices that evening, that’s about $2.5 billion, $1.6 billion of it in USDT. Seventeen minutes later, 780 million USDC left a second Binance-labeled wallet for the same address. Binance didn’t call it a hack that afternoon. A spokesperson told TechCrunch the exchange “temporarily suspended withdrawals on multiple networks following a security incident as a precautionary measure” and that “user funds are completely safe.”
No native bitcoin was in that wallet. The closest thing was 82.54 WBTC, a token that stands in for bitcoin. Bitcoin paid anyway. On Crypto.com it went from $80,387 at 4:31 PM to $78,178 at 4:47, down $2,209 in 16 minutes, and Coinbase touched $78,177.37 in the same window. Part of the day was already going wrong: bitcoin was down from $81,916 at 12:09 PM and dropped $714 at the 4:00 PM stock close, before anything moved.
Then the stablecoins stopped. Just after 7 PM ET, the receiving address still held 1,175,464,711 USDT and 823,000,000 USDC, and both token contracts list it as blacklisted. We checked. That’s about $2 billion frozen by two companies with a switch. The ETH had no switch. By then the address held 2,073 ETH, and the rest had moved on.
A freeze is the same tool whether it’s aimed at a thief or at you. Bitcoin has no issuer to call, so a stolen coin stays stolen and a held coin can’t be switched off. At 7:09 PM ET, Binance’s own network list showed bitcoin withdrawals open on the bitcoin network and on Lightning. USDT was paused on six networks, one with the note “Withdrawals are temporarily halted while Binance replenishes the hot wallet.” Coins on an exchange sit behind the exchange’s keys. Binance says the keys didn’t leak. Someone got into the system that tells them what to sign. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $78,407.