Binance says reserves cover 90% of stolen funds, promises full reimbursement
The FBI said Saturday that North Korean hackers orchestrated the theft of billions of dollars from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, within a matter of minutes — the biggest crypto heist in history.
The bureau said in a statement that this week’s attack was tied to “malicious cyber activity” by an entity known as TraderTraitor, the same actors behind a $1.5 billion hack of Bybit last year.
The stolen sum totaled $6.3 billion in bitcoin and other digital currency, taken from Binance on Thursday in what several crypto experts said bore the hallmarks of a North Korean hack.
Binance said Saturday that it had enough set aside in the same digital currency that was stolen to cover 90% of the missing assets, and the company promised that customers would be fully reimbursed.
The FBI asked crypto exchanges, blockchain analytics companies and others to block transactions linked to various addresses to make sure the money is not laundered to cover up its origins.
The bureau said its probe found that TraderTraitor was converting the stolen assets primarily into a cryptocurrency called ethereum, and it expects that TraderTraitor will now attempt to convert the assets using DeFi and “instant swap services.”
Ari Redbord, chief policy officer at the blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs, said he expects the hackers will break the stolen assets into pieces and try to launder them through smaller exchanges to evade detection, a process that could unfold over months.
“It’s bank robbery, in this case, at the speed of the Internet,” Redbord said. “However, we can also track and trace those funds in real time in order to build investigations, to disrupt and to seize back funds.”
“It’s just this cat and mouse game,” he added.