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An independent record of the October 2026 Binance hack
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Chainalysis said its current estimate of the amount stolen from Binance is $5.912 billion at the time of theft, four times the amount stolen from crypto exchange Bybit in 2025.
Reviewer note: Event time is the time Cointelegraph stamped its live-blog entry (12:26 am 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.