Binance sees spike in withdrawals as exchange returns online after $6.3Bheist
Binance customers pulled $3.64 billion, or 2.1% of its assets, as the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange went back online on Sunday after hackers the FBI links to North Korea stole billions from the platform last week.Binance said withdrawals were stabilizing after an initial spike and deposit volumes had remained “substantial.” The exchange said it had now covered 95% of the $6.3 billion of stolen assets.The heist, which analysts believe may be the biggest financial robbery ever, adds to a string of recent crypto thefts.Withdrawal levels are an early test of whether customers still trust the exchange with their money after the attack.
Attackers stole $2.9 billion worth of cryptocurrency across nearly 150 incidents last year, according to researchers at TRM Labs.Binance said the net outflows reflected what clients had withdrawn and deposited as of 1530 GMT.Crypto analytics platform DefiLlama said on its dashboard that outflows were higher, at $4.36 billion.“This figure does not contain the flows we have deposited to our own new hot wallet, so they are not accurate.
Our last update on X is closest to accurate (outstanding the moves in both deposits and withdrawals since it was posted),” a spokesperson for Binance said of the DefiLlama data.Binance, which was founded in China, said the rollout for withdrawals would be carried out in phases, prioritizing user demand.The first phase covered 15 tokens including bitcoin, ether and those involving some USDC and USDT stablecoins and dogecoin.“We are taking a phased approach by prioritizing tokens based on the past week data of user demand,” Binance said in an earlier article posted on X.Binance said earlier on Sunday that it had covered $6 billion of stolen cryptocurrencies by using company money to buy replacement tokens.
The remaining 5% of stolen tokens consist of less liquid assets and may take longer to source in the required amounts, it said.The FBI said on Saturday that the North Korean state-sp...