Between 20:24 and 21:04 UTC on October 29, roughly $2.5 billion to $3.3 billion in cryptocurrency left wallets that Etherscan labels as Binance hot wallets. The transfers hit Ethereum first and spread across multiple chains. Within an hour, stablecoin issuers had frozen what they could reach.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company "froze more than 1.567 billion USDT related to a potential Binance exchange hack." Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire confirmed his firm froze more than $800 million in USDC, adding that the action came in coordination with law enforcement. Together the freezes immobilized somewhere between $1.8 billion and $2.4 billion in stablecoins.
Binance Has Not Called It a Hack
The exchange's official response stopped short of confirming a breach. "Our teams are aware of reports of a potential security issue and are actively investigating," Binance posted on X. "User funds are completely safe."
Changpeng Zhao, the company's founder and former CEO, was less circumspect. "It does look like a hack on Binance," he wrote on X. "I don't manage Binance (.com) anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered."
On-chain analysts noted that the wallet which triggered the initial transfer was funded only through Tornado Cash, a mixing service that obscures the origin of funds. The receiving address was created hours before the transfers began. Etherscan later tagged both the sending and receiving addresses as "Binance Hot Wallet Exploiter."
What Cannot Be Frozen
Stablecoin issuers can blacklist addresses at the smart contract level, rendering tokens unmovable. Native assets like ETH have no such off-switch. According to Crypto Briefing, an estimated $700 million in USDT and ETH moved before the blacklisting or fell outside its reach.
Binance maintains an emergency reserve called the Secure Asset Fund for Users, or SAFU, established in July 2018 and funded by 10 percent of trading fees. As of October 2026, that fund held approximately $1 billion. Whether it would cover losses on this scale is unclear. The exchange has not said whether the incident affected customer deposits.
Some users reported withdrawals stuck in processing. BNB, the exchange's native token, fell as much as 9 percent in the hours after the outflows were flagged. Bitcoin briefly dropped below $79,000.
Binance said it would provide updates through official channels once it has verified information. At publication, those updates had not arrived.
