Binance reopened for trading on Sunday after suspending all transactions following the theft of $6.3 billion in digital assets, and the exchange immediately felt the pressure of nervous customers: between 6 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. GMT, it processed $4.65 billion in withdrawal requests against just $1.01 billion in deposits, a net outflow of roughly $3.6 billion — about 2 percent of its total assets under management.
The exchange said the spike "stabilised as expected" by the end of the window and that withdrawals of major coins, including bitcoin and ether, have resumed in phases rather than all at once, a deliberate throttling meant to prevent exactly the kind of run that followed. Binance has said it will cover the entire loss and now claims to have replaced 95 percent of the stolen funds, up from the 90 percent it reported Saturday, through a combination of its corporate treasury, futures-insurance fund and emergency reserves.
Tracing the money
The theft, disclosed Oct. 30, is the largest crypto heist on record. The FBI has formally attributed it to North Korea's TraderTraitor hacking group, part of the broader Lazarus network, and published a list of implicated wallet addresses Saturday urging exchanges and other industry partners to block transactions from them. Binance has said the breach traced back to a compromised engineer's laptop and that its U.S.-facing platform was unaffected.
We continue to see funds being laundered quite actively. The attackers are layering these funds across many thousands of addresses, across thousands of deposits.
Alec Zebrick, senior manager of global investigations, Chainalysis
Blockchain-analytics firms including Chainalysis say the laundering pattern is familiar from past North Korean operations: rapid conversion into ether, then fragmentation across thousands of addresses to frustrate tracing before the funds are eventually cashed out through mixers or non-compliant exchanges.
What happens next
Binance says bitcoin and ether deposits are now largely normal, while withdrawals of some assets remain partially restricted as the platform works through its backlog. Competing exchanges have used the outage to court nervous customers, and several national regulators, including in the European Union, have asked Binance for a formal briefing on the security failure. The exchange has not given a date for when it expects withdrawal limits to be fully lifted.
