Astana, 31 October. Binance said it has set aside more than 6.34 billion dollars of its own funds to cover losses from the hack, with 5 billion of that already held in the same tokens the attackers moved out, Cointelegraph reports.
About 3 billion dollars of the affected assets have been frozen with the help of blockchain partners; that money is not part of the 6.34 billion. The stablecoin issuer Tether froze almost 1.57 billion dollars and Circle more than 800 million, Daily Sabah reports. Binance promised to reflect the set-aside funds in its next proof-of-reserves report, the document in which an exchange shows that it holds at least as many assets as it owes its customers.
Binance co-CEO Richard Teng wrote that customers’ money is safe and the company will cover every loss. According to Teng, the preliminary investigation points to the compromised laptop of a DevOps engineer: through it the attacker reached a service container used to submit unauthorised transfers; no sign of a leak of wallet private keys has been found, The Block writes. The FBI and the US Secret Service have joined the investigation, Decrypt reports.
Binance plans to restore withdrawals by Sunday, 1 November; the work, it says, is on schedule, TASS reported.
On the same day, before Binance’s statement, the head of the firm CertiK, Ronghui Gu, estimated that the frozen 3 billion and the exchange’s 1.17 billion emergency fund would cover about 66% of the reported losses, leaving a gap of roughly 2.1 billion dollars, Cointelegraph notes. After the statement about 5 billion in the same tokens, CertiK, according to the same source, is waiting for more details to verify that figure.
What it means: Earlier Binance promised to cover losses from the SAFU fund and company money without naming sums; now a figure has been named, 6.34 billion, almost equal to the estimates of the damage at 6.3–6.4 billion dollars. Whether that money really sits where Binance says can be checked only against the proof-of-reserves report.
What we know now: The exchange says customer funds were not touched and that it will repay the losses from its own money. More than 6.34 billion dollars has been set aside, of which 5 billion is in the same tokens. About 3 billion has been frozen by partners and is not included in that sum. As of the morning of 31 October no timetable for returning the frozen assets had been given; there is no independent check of the 5 billion yet.
Background: Binance created the SAFU fund (Secure Asset Fund for Users) in 2018 with 1 billion dollars, Kitco recalls; it is meant as insurance for customers in the event of a hack. Analysts at TRM Labs and Chainalysis link the attack to the North Korean group TraderTraitor, Decrypt reports. The previous record was the theft of about 1.5 billion dollars from the Bybit exchange in February 2025.
We have also reported that 6.36 billion dollars was stolen in the Binance hack, with a trail leading to North Korea, and that the National Bank said the Binance hack did not touch Kazakhstan’s crypto reserve.
