NEW YORK, United States / CryptoWire.AI / – Stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle have frozen tokens linked to a security breach at Binance, as the exchange estimated the total impact at about $6.3 billion. Binance disclosed the incident on Thursday, October 29, and said around $3 billion had been frozen on-chain so far. It suspended deposits and withdrawals as a precaution while it investigates. The exchange is the world’s largest by trading volume.
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao thanked Tether for freezing about $971 million and Circle for about $823 million, a combined $1.8 billion. Tether later raised its figure to nearly $1.57 billion, according to Reuters, while Circle said it had frozen more than $800 million. Ripple froze about $200 million. Binance has not explained how its $3 billion frozen estimate is divided between issuers and assets. A blacklist registry showed Tether’s first request for $971.1 million was pending execution at one stage.
Binance said it will cover all losses through its SAFU fund and company money, and that user funds are safe. Its initial review found that an attacker used a DevOps engineer’s compromised laptop to reach a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawals. The exchange found no evidence of a private key leak. The breach adds to a series of cyberattacks on exchanges in recent years.
Investigators trace funds to Bitget exploit
On-chain investigator ZachXBT reported that stolen Binance funds landed at the same address as money taken in the $388 million Bitget hack in September. Both sets of funds arrived through the cross-chain protocol THORChain. ZachXBT said the same actor was likely behind both incidents. The Bitget attack had been linked to TraderTraitor, a North Korea-linked group that he said overlapped with earlier exploits such as Kelp DAO. Binance has not confirmed the attribution.
Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs attributed the Binance theft to TraderTraitor with high confidence. Chainalysis chief executive Jonathan Levin said the group was likely responsible and estimated the stolen amount at $6.4 billion. Early on-chain records showed an Ethereum address holding more than $2.3 billion in tokens. It received 28,005.6 ETH from a Binance wallet and moved 195,460 ETH, worth about $440 million, onward. The figures reflect one address, not the exchange-wide total.
Markets fall as USDT briefly slips
Tether’s USDT slipped about 0.1% below $1 on some exchanges as news of the breach spread. One decentralised exchange quote showed a deeper discount, but it did not reflect a market-wide break of the peg. Bitcoin fell about 2% to a six-week low of $77,646 on Friday. Ether lost about 2% to $2,238.76, after earlier sell-offs this year. Ether’s price was its lowest in two months.
BNB, the token linked to Binance, dropped more than 8% to $694. The crypto selloff had started before the first wallet alerts appeared, so a direct link to the breach is not proven. Binance said it will publish a detailed post-mortem and an updated Proof of Reserves once the investigation is complete. Users have been told to rely only on official Binance channels for updates.