Binance says it has reserved more than $6.34 billion in company funds to repay customers after attackers drained an estimated $6.3 billion from its hot wallets on October 29, 2026, the largest cryptocurrency theft on record. The number is Binance’s own, and no one outside the exchange has verified it.
Co-founder Yi He wrote on X that “User funds are safe. Binance will cover all hacking losses. Deposits and withdrawals are temporarily suspended while our team conducts security checks, freezes funds, and works with law enforcement.” Binance itself puts the loss at about $6.3 billion, and security firm TRM Labs, which attributes the attack with high confidence to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group, puts it at $6.36 billion.
What the reserve actually rests on
The $6.34 billion reserve, as Binance describes it, is made up of two unequal parts. The company says $5 billion of it was already held in the affected tokens before the attack. The remainder would draw on its SAFU fund, the Secure Asset Fund for Users it set up in 2018, which holds roughly $1 billion in bitcoin. That math clears the loss line on paper, but the $5 billion holding is Binance’s own claim: the exchange declined to disclose the wallet addresses behind it, and the audit firm CertiK said it could not verify the holdings without more information.
The reserve also sits against a much bigger balance sheet. Binance held roughly $144 billion in platform assets before the attack, according to DefiLlama data, so the stolen funds amount to about 4% of what customers had on the exchange.
How much comes back is separate
Repayment is not only a matter of reserves. Industry partners froze about $3 billion of the moved assets, including $2.3 billion in USDT and USDC, in the hours after the first transfers. Tether froze more than $1.57 billion USDT and Circle froze more than $800 million USDC, the two issuers said. On Ethereum alone, approximately $2.4 billion removed from Binance wallets has been frozen or blacklisted. Whether any of that money returns to the exchange, and how much, Binance has not said.
The loss estimate itself has moved daily, from $2.77 billion in the first on-chain tallies to Chainalysis’ revised $5.9 billion, and the staged reopening of withdrawals is scheduled to begin Sunday, November 1, subject to completed security checks, with proof-of-reserves results promised by Monday, November 2.
