Last night Binance suffered the largest hack on record of $6.36 billion, though it says that around $3 billion has been frozen, mainly by stablecoin issuers Tether ($1.57 billion according to the company) and Circle (more than $800 million). TRM Labs said North Korea’s TraderTraitor executed the hack. This is more than four times the Bybit incident in February 2025.
While Binance hasn’t completed its investigation, the company said there is no evidence of a private key leak. The hack started with the compromise of a DevOps employee’s computer, but that was merely the first step in a sophisticated attack. The world’s largest crypto exchange has a SAFU fund worth more than $1 billion for this sort of emergency and said it would cover any additional shortfall from its own funds.
Knowing that stablecoin issuers might freeze wallets, the hackers quickly started converting stablecoins, with $729 million of USDT turned into ETH and TRX before the freezes landed, according to Bitquery. More than $400 million of the conversion was on Ethereum, with $325 million converted mainly via UniswapX. One novel aspect is that UniswapX is not a conventional automated market maker (AMM). It is a hybrid solution that runs an auction including an RFQ involving conventional market makers, with a fallback to AMMs. In other words, this $325 million conversion took place via market makers, with the hackers accepting a discount of more than 10%. While that sounds steep, such a large conversion through an AMM would have pushed the ether price sharply against them with each tranche.
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