Cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced Thursday that it had been the victim of a major hack with damages estimated at some $6.3 billion, with half of the funds having been frozen to prevent a massive theft.
Binance published several contradictory messages on the X platform, first assuring that all funds deposited by customers on its site were “totally safe”, before announcing, a little later, that it would cover “all losses”.
The platform then indicated on its X account for Latin America that “the total amount impacted was approximately $6.3 billion.”
“We have worked with specialist blockchain partners to freeze the affected assets; around 3 billion $ have been frozen on-chain (blocked on the blockchain, Editor’s note) so far,” adds the press release.
This would be four times the amount stolen – the largest cyberattack of this type to date: $1.5 billion was siphoned off the Bybit platform in February 2025, a theft attributed to hackers affiliated with North Korea.
Around 12:30 a.m. Friday, Binance announced that “all deposits and withdrawals” were “temporarily suspended.”
The amount could increase further
“This amount could continue to increase as our teams work closely with authorities, issuers, data analysis companies and industry partners to identify and freeze additional assets” that may have been targeted, Binance added.
“This looks like a cyberattack on Binance,” commented on X Changpeng Zhao, former boss of the platform who no longer holds operational functions but still remains a majority shareholder of the group.
He estimated that the losses linked to this assault could be “a little higher” than a billion $.
The boss of Tether, a company issuing in particular a cryptocurrency called USDT, the third digital currency by volume in circulation (around $180 billion), announced that it had frozen around $1.6 billion of these assets “in connection with a potential attack” on Binance.
As for the CEO of Circle, which oversees the USDC cryptocurrency, he announced the immobilization of around $800 million.
USDT and USDC are “stablecoins”, that is to say electronic currencies whose value is backed by a traditional currency, in this case the dollar.
Circle boss Jeremy Allaire clarified that this action had been taken in consultation with the authorities.
Requested by AFP, the American Department of Justice and the FBI did not immediately respond.
For several hours, before Binance confirmed the attack around 11:30 p.m. on Thursday, several specialists claimed that hackers had entered the platform.
In this context, the prices of all major cryptocurrencies briefly declined, with the exception of stablecoins which can, by definition, only fluctuate within very small margins.
After falling by almost 5% at the end of the American session, bitcoin recovered and lost only 0.83% around 05:00 GMT, while ether showed a slight decline of 0.81%. BNB, a cryptocurrency issued by Binance, rebounded by 2.67% after having fallen by almost 10%.
The cyberattack on Binance comes as several observers are concerned that the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) models are putting cryptography and computer security protocols at risk.
Some have thus seen in a breakthrough, announced independently this week by OpenAI and Anthropic on the same IT concept, a first tangible sign of a turning point.
By refuting the so-called exponential time hypothesis (ETH), they have thus given a glimpse of the possibility of simplification of the decryption of encryption protocols, even if nothing practical can be learned from this demonstration immediately.
However, the blockchain protocol, the foundation of cryptocurrencies, relies on cryptography to guarantee the theoretical inviolability of the system and the security of transactions.
