Major cryptocurrency companies moved Thursday to freeze billions of dollars in digital assets potentially connected to a security breach at Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume.
Binance later announced that the estimated impact of the security breach affecting its systems has reached approximately $6.3 billion. The company said it has so far frozen around $3 billion in assets in cooperation with blockchain industry partners.
In a post on X, Binance said its preliminary investigation indicated that the breach may have involved a compromised laptop belonging to an engineer, allowing an attacker to gain access and carry out unauthorized withdrawal transactions. The company said it was working with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets and pledged to cover all losses through its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) and corporate funds.
US blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs said that North Korean hackers were responsible for the Binance breach.
According to the company, the attackers transferred approximately $6.36 billion from the exchange's wallets across ten blockchain networks, with most of the funds moved in just 20 minutes. TRM Labs attributed the attack to the North Korean hacking group TraderTraitor with a high degree of confidence.
Several prominent cryptocurrency companies announced measures to prevent funds potentially associated with the incident from being transferred.
Circle Internet Group CEO Jeremy Allaire said Thursday evening that his company had frozen more than 800 million USD Coin tokens connected to the suspected breach.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino separately announced on X that the company had blocked more than 1.5 billion USDT tokens that may have been associated with the incident.
Binance co-founder Yi He later disclosed that Ripple, the cryptocurrency company associated with XRP and RLUSD, had helped prevent the movement of another $200 million in funds potentially linked to the suspected attack.
The amount of cryptocurrency affected could be considerably larger than the assets frozen so far.
News of the breach and the companies' efforts to block potentially compromised funds coincided with declines across major cryptocurrency markets.
Bitcoin fell more than 3%, dropping below $80,000. Ether declined nearly 4%, while solana lost approximately 3%.