Binance suspends withdrawals over a possible hack and frozen funds stand at around 3,000 million

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange according to El Financiero, which cites Bloomberg, temporarily suspended deposits and withdrawals on Thursday night after detecting a possible security problem. According to FinanceFeeds, the suspension of withdrawals began at 22:15 UTC (23:15 in mainland Spain). The company said on X that it was a precautionary measure while it reviews security, freezes the funds involved and cooperates with the authorities, and that customer funds are safe and it will cover the losses, according to El Financiero and investingLive.

In an update published on its official account at 00:52 UTC on Friday, Binance put the verified total frozen at “around 3,000 million” dollars, according to FinanceFeeds; hours earlier it had given 2,540 million. Part of that amount has been frozen by stablecoin issuers: Tether says it has frozen more than 1,567 million USDT and Circle more than 800 million USDC, according to the same outlets.

Binance has not published how much the attacker has taken and says it will only give confirmed figures. Estimates differ: FinanceFeeds calculates about 3,300 million taken from its Ethereum wallets; Decrypt, cited by FinanceFeeds, at least 5,570 million across several networks, and co-founder Changpeng Zhao, who no longer runs the company, spoke of just over 1,000 million, according to investingLive. Bitcoin.com warns that some tallies may include movements unrelated to the incident.

According to FinanceFeeds, Binance's investigation indicates that the attacker got in through the compromised laptop of a DevOps engineer, and co-CEO Yi He wrote at 04:17 UTC that she expects to resume withdrawals “within the next 48 hours”. Binance has not attributed the attack to anyone and no regulator had commented, according to FinanceFeeds. Bitcoin fell below 77,000 dollars, according to Bloomberg as cited by El Financiero.