Binance says 90% of stolen assets replenished, targets Sunday withdrawals
Binance said Saturday it had replenished 90% of the assets stolen in its $6.3 billion hack, up from 80% a day earlier, and remained on track to resume withdrawals Sunday.The exchange is using a combination of its corporate treasury, a partial deployment of its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) and a portion of its futures insurance fund, a spokesperson told Cointelegraph.“Binance will absorb the financial impact of the stolen funds, not users,” the spokesperson said, adding that the insurance fund would remain above required risk management levels.The update follows Thursday’s theft, the largest cryptocurrency hack on record, which TRM Labs has since attributed to North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacker group.Following the hack, Binance said Friday it had set aside $6.34 billion to cover losses, including $5 billion in the affected cryptocurrencies. Industry partners like Tether and Circle froze about $3 billion in affected assets after the hack, but those funds are separate from Binance’s replacement of stolen tokens.Still, CertiK told Cointelegraph on Friday that it needed more information to verify Binance’s claimed $5 billion in replacement cryptocurrencies. Binance has since published a new reserves snapshot, but says the full cryptographic proof is still being generated. “The full zero-knowledge proof takes approximately 40 to 50 hours to generate due to the computational workload,” the exchange’s update reads.Binance said in its update on X that customer balances in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and eight other assets were fully backed. The remaining shortfall consists of less liquid tokens that it continues to buy through market and over-the-counter transactions, the update reads.The spokesperson’s statement did not specify how much each funding source contributed or disclose the insurance fund’s minimum required balance. It also did not quantify how much stolen crypto had been recovered.Read Cointelegraph’s full coverage of the Binance hack here.