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An independent record of the October 2026 Binance hack
This line is our short summary of the quote below. The quote is the evidence.
A Binance spokesperson told Cointelegraph on Thursday that the exchange was investigating reports of a potential security issue but had not confirmed any impact on user funds.
Reviewer note: Event time is the time Cointelegraph stamped its live-blog entry (9:15 pm UTC), not a time stated by the speaker.
Blockchain security firm Blockaid said its team had identified roughly $3.3 billion in suspicious transfers involving Binance-linked wallets across Ethereum, Arbitrum and Avalanche.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company had frozen more than $1.567 billion in USDT linked to the potential exploit.
Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said the company had frozen more than $800 million in USDC in coordination with law enforcement and would continue supporting the investigation.
Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao said the activity appeared to be a hack, adding that Tether and Circle had frozen approximately $971 million and $823 million, respectively. Zhao said he expected all user funds to be fully covered.
Blockchain analytics platform Arkham Intelligence later identified a collection of wallets labeled “binance-hacker-1029” holding approximately $5.84 billion in digital assets. The figure represents the wallets’ reported holdings rather than a confirmed estimate of stolen funds.