Global cryptocurrency exchange Binance has estimated that a security breach had an impact of about $6.3 billion, with around $3 billion in affected assets frozen so far. The incident has prompted a precautionary restriction on futures trading at Indian exchange CoinDCX.
Binance said its initial investigation indicated that an attacker may have used a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer to access an internal service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions. The company said it had found no evidence that wallet private keys were leaked. It later reported additional points of breach and said a detailed technical account would follow after its investigation.
The exchange temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals while carrying out security checks and working with law enforcement and blockchain intelligence firms. It said it would cover user losses through its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) and company funds. Stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, along with other industry partners, helped freeze assets linked to the incident.
The breach affected cryptocurrency markets. Bitcoin fell nearly 5% to a six-week low, while Ether dropped more than 4%. Analysts described the incident as potentially the largest cryptocurrency theft on record.
The impact has extended to India because local exchanges use Binance as a source of liquidity for futures products. CoinDCX said its futures service had moved temporarily to “Reduce-Only” mode, preventing users from opening new positions or increasing existing ones. Deposits and withdrawals on CoinDCX remained available.
Govind Rammurthy, chief executive and managing director of eScan, said the incident pointed to weaknesses in access controls and the separation of development systems from transaction-signing infrastructure. “The hard part of this heist wasn’t out-thinking or out-manoeuvring Binance’s defences with machine intelligence; it was getting into the right machine,” he said. He cautioned that the cause remained under investigation and that AI involvement had not been publicly confirmed.
Binance said it was working with law enforcement and industry partners to trace the remaining assets. Its investigation is continuing.
