Statements

Neither Binance nor law enforcement officials have named any suspected links between the attack and North Korean hackers.

The majority of the stolen crypto was taken in a period of around 20 minutes on October 29, according to analysis by crypto tracing firm TRM Labs.

Elliptic’s Robinson says that around $2.8 billion, or around 44 percent of the total amount stolen, has been frozen by crypto companies and exchanges so far, with almost all of this being stablecoins.

Gu said the estimated gap represented about 1.3% of Binance’s reported $165 billion in exchange reserves.

$165 billion in exchange reserves. Those reserves include assets backing customer balances.

“The $5 billion is held in the exact token assets that are required. These assets are in Binance custody,” a Binance spokesperson told Cointelegraph.

he said Gulf, Binance’s partner in Thailand, had offered financial support.

that the exchange’s revenue for the year was sufficient to cover the hack losses and that the company did not need to sell its stake in SpaceX.

CertiK told Cointelegraph that it needed more information from Binance to assess whether the claimed $5 billion in tokens matching those stolen could be independently verified on-chain.

Blockchain analytics company Nansen told Cointelegraph that it could not verify what funds Binance had available beyond its roughly $1.16 billion emergency fund or where the money to cover the remaining losses would come from.

The spokesperson declined to disclose wallet addresses, citing security reasons. Binance did not disclose when it acquired the assets.

The exchange also said it submits weekly reports on company funds to Abu Dhabi’s Financial Services Regulatory Authority under a requirement that predated the hack.

A Binance spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the $5 billion in matching tokens is held in the exchange’s custody. The spokesperson declined to disclose wallet addresses, citing security reasons.

Tether and Circle used it, locking up about $2.39 billion between them. That’s 43% of the haul. That leaves somewhere between $2.6 and $3.2 billion still out there.

It later added that it has "begun recovering" some funds.

Stablecoin issuer Tether said it froze nearly $1.57 billion in assets linked to the incident, while Circle froze more than $800 million.

On October 30, the attacker began moving funds between blockchains. Between 11:38 and 12:29 UTC, they sold all of the stolen AVAX for USDC, bridged it to Ethereum using Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), and swapped it for 7,242.8 ETH.

“We are still gathering the facts, and will share more directly as we have them,” it wrote.

The effects of the hack on crypto markets were compounded by tech-stock losses that came with Q4 earnings projections.

Binance is buying altcoins in quantities matching those stolen in the hack as it prepares updated proof of reserves,

Ben-Natan warned that similar signing-system attacks threaten other exchanges and said transaction simulation could help detect malicious requests before they receive approval.

“This is a problem with EIP 7702, it’s just very, very poorly understood,” Georgiev said.

He said attackers could have drained the funds through other methods, but warned that exchange engineers might overlook the need to revoke a malicious EIP-7702 delegation after regaining control of their systems.

Ben-Natan said attackers may have used a compromised developer’s computer to gain access to Binance’s wallet-signing infrastructure.

“The takeaway is that ultimately the signer signed a transaction that they shouldn’t have,” he said.