Binance Resumes Withdrawals After Suffering Biggest-Ever Crypto Hack — WSJ
By Joshua Jamerson and Matt WirzBinance on Sunday began allowing customers to resume withdrawals from its exchange after racing to cover its losses in the biggest cyber heist in history.The newsBinance, in a series of statements on X, said it had re-enabled withdrawals for bitcoin, ether and certain other digital currencies and would continue to enable more withdrawals in phases. The exchange last week had blocked customers from withdrawing funds while its team conducted security checks.Binance said it has now replaced roughly 95% of the stolen assets. The outstanding 5% "are less liquid in the market and take longer time to source at the required scale," the company said.Withdrawal activityNine and a half hours after Binance started allowing withdrawals, the exchange said it had seen a net outflow of $3.64 billion. This was the result of about $4.65 billion in withdrawals and $1.1 billion in deposits, Binance said.The exchange said this net outflow represents 2.1% of its total assets under management.The contextThe exchange, which has a de facto base in the United Arab Emirates, says it doesn't accept U.S. customers. Its sister exchange, Binance.US, which operates in the U.S. and is separate from Binance, said it wasn't affected by the hack.The hackers plundered $6.3 billion from the exchange's digital wallets by breaking into a Binance engineer's laptop, among other breaches, Binance said. Cybersecurity researchers and the Federal Bureau of Investigation attributed the theft to North Korea's TraderTraitor hacking group.Stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle, along with other crypto firms, managed to freeze about $3 billion of that sum, leaving roughly $3.3 billion under the hackers' control.The exchange reserved over $6.3 billion of company funds to cover users' affected assets. The company previously said it was fronting the money and planned to pay itself back with the $3 billion in frozen funds once it is released. "Binance will absorb the financial impact of the stolen funds, not our users," the company said Sunday.Binance earlier said it held $5 billion of the $6.3 billion it was fronting in the same cryptocurrencies that hackers stole, and was purchasing the remaining $1.3 billion of cryptocurrency through market channels.What's nextThe company said on X that it "will continue to restore additional assets and networks in phases as security checks are completed." It also said that once the investigation is complete, "we will publish a post-incident report with further details on the incident."Write to Joshua Jamerson at [email protected] and Matt Wirz at [email protected]