Hackers steal $6.3B from Binance in biggest crypto heist ever; COIN, MSTR, CRCL tumble premarket (Oct 30)
What happened
Hackers drained about $6.3 billion of crypto from Binance's transaction-processing wallets in roughly 20 minutes starting around 20:00 GMT Thursday, making it the biggest digital-asset theft in history — more than four times the previous record (Bybit, $1.5B). Binance initially blamed a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop; blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs says the attackers compromised Binance's signing infrastructure to authorize unauthorized withdrawals. TRM and Elliptic say the attack bears the hallmarks of North Korea's TraderTraitor unit, the same state-sponsored group the FBI blamed for the Bybit theft. Roughly half the stolen assets — about $3B — have been frozen by stablecoin issuers (Tether, Circle, Ripple, and World Liberty Financial); an estimated $2.4B in BTC and ETH is likely beyond reach. Binance has suspended all deposits and withdrawals, expects to resume them within 45-48 hours, and says customer funds are safe with losses covered by its $1B SAFU reserve. Bitcoin fell over 3-4% to a six-week low near $76,400 and ether slid to a two-month low near $2,180.
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Who’s affected
- Coinbase (COIN) — down ~4.5-6.5% in premarket Friday despite its own Thursday after-close earnings beat; the sector-wide selloff erased its post-earnings goodwill
- Strategy (MSTR) — down ~6.5% in premarket as a Bitcoin proxy; BTC weakness directly hits its treasury valuation
- Circle (CRCL) — down ~5.5-6% in premarket; the hack puts stablecoin security infrastructure in the spotlight
- Bitcoin miners and other crypto-exposed names — broad contagion across the crypto equity complex