Binance sees $4.7B in customer withdrawals after stunning North Korea hack
Binance has recorded more than $4.7 billion in outflows since it resumed customer withdrawals on Sunday, following a stunning North Korean hack that experts called the largest bank heist in history.It represents just 3% of the massive cryptocurrency exchange’s total assets and withdrawal levels are already stabilizing to normal levels, a spokesperson for Binance told The Post on Monday. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Saturday that the notorious North Korean state-backed cybercrime group TraderTraitor was responsible for the record $6.4 billion heist. After the hack was first detected Thursday evening, Binance worked with other exchanges and stablecoin providers to quickly freeze about $2.8 billion – falling short of the total stolen sum by roughly $3 billion.It also paused withdrawals and vowed to cover all losses in full.The crypto exchange said it has since covered 95% of the losses by using company funds to buy replacement tokens, restoring balances in the top 10 coins – including bitcoin, ether, solana and USDT, the US dollar-linked stablecoin. The remaining 5% of stolen funds were linked to tokens that “are less liquid in the market and take longer time to source at the required scale,” a Binance spokesperson said.
“We continue purchasing the remaining affected assets through market and OTC channels.”Binance co-founder Yi He also said in a post on X Sunday that not all of the outflows are customer withdrawals, and that some are transfers from cold wallets, also known as hardware wallets, to hot wallets.“Some are large Binance cold wallet transfers to hot wallets, please keep following along!” she wrote with a heart emoji, as translated from Chinese by the social-media platform. Crypto-related assets dipped Friday following news of the attack, but the industry has remained surprisingly resilient.Bitcoin traded at $77,622.89 on Monday, little changed after dropping below $80,000 last week for the first time in a month.Binance sai...