Digital assetsMarket noteMonday 2 November 2026, 08:44
The FBI says North Korea's TraderTraitor hackers took over $6bn from Binance: one night's haul, close to the $6.75bn it stole in crypto in all years to 2025.
The FBI said on 31 October that North Korea stole more than $6bn in crypto from Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, on or about 29 October, its alert says. That makes the North Korea crypto hack the largest theft the industry has seen, and a jump in scale even for a state that has made stealing crypto a source of revenue. One night’s haul comes close to everything North Korea had stolen in crypto before it: $6.75bn up to the end of 2025, by the count of the blockchain analysts at Chainalysis.
The alert names “TraderTraitor”, the FBI’s label for this strand of North Korean hacking. It used the same name in February 2025, when it held North Korea responsible for the theft of about $1.5bn from the exchange Bybit, its alert then said. This time, the FBI says, TraderTraitor is turning the stolen assets mainly into ether, and it expects the money to pass through decentralised finance (DeFi) and instant swap services on its way to further laundering.
With the Secret Service and the tax agency’s criminal investigators, the FBI asks node operators, swap services, exchanges and analytics firms to block transactions with 628 addresses it lists: 608 on Ethereum, 19 on Bitcoin and one on Solana. The alert gives no evidence for the attribution. The analysts at TRM Labs had already blamed North Korea on the night of the theft, as we reported on 30 October. The FBI’s word turns an analyst’s judgment into the position of the US government, and that matters to the firms it asks to act.
North Korean hackers stole at least $2.02bn in crypto in 2025, 51% more than in 2024, Chainalysis estimates, a record year built mostly on Bybit. Their attacks made up 76% of all hacks of crypto companies that year. Three years earlier, the FBI held the Lazarus Group and APT38, units tied to North Korea, responsible for the theft of $620m in ether reported on 29 March 2022, its statement of April 2022 says, from Ronin, the network behind the game Axie Infinity.
Binance dwarfs all of it. TRM counts $6.36bn taken from Binance wallets, its report says: more than three times North Korea’s record year, and four times Bybit.
North Korea’s laundering follows a pattern. Chainalysis finds a cycle of about 45 days after a large theft, a strong preference for Chinese-language money movement services, cross-chain bridges and mixers, and transfers kept small: slightly over 60% of the volume moves in pieces worth less than $500,000. If Binance follows the same path, the money will be on the move until about mid-December.
Some of it is out of reach for good. Stablecoin issuers froze about $2.7bn within hours, but about $2.4bn in ether and bitcoin cannot be frozen by any issuer, TRM counted on 30 October. That leaves the exchanges and brokers where the money surfaces, and banks that miss suspect payments pay a price for it, as with Bank of America’s fine this month.
Binance began to restore withdrawals at 06:00 UTC on 1 November. Between 06:00 and 15:30 UTC it paid out $4.649bn and took in $1.01bn, a net outflow of about $3.64bn, its post on X says. That is 2.1% of the $171bn it held for customers in its proof of reserves of 28 October. Withdrawals fell after an early spike, Binance says, and deposits stayed high. Its chief executive, Richard Teng, said on 31 October that Binance had replaced 90% of the stolen assets and would cover the rest, on X.
Prices took the news calmly. Bitcoin was at $78,277 at 08:42 UTC on 2 November, against $77,766 on the morning after the theft, and BNB, Binance’s own token, at $709.89, CoinGecko’s prices show.
This is analysis and opinion, not investment advice.
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