Binance Pauses Withdrawals After More Than $3 Billion Leaves Its Hot Wallets and Tether and Circle Freeze $2.4 Billion
Binance has not confirmed a breach, but a founder says it looks like a hack, stablecoin issuers have frozen billions and bitcoin slid toward $78,800 as leveraged longs were wiped out.
Thursday, October 29, 2026/2 min read
More than $3 billion left Binance's Ethereum hot wallets in a few minutes on Thursday evening, and the exchange has not yet said whether it was robbed. Tether and Circle froze about $2.4 billion of the stablecoins that moved, Binance paused withdrawals on several networks, and the founder who built the exchange wrote that "it does look like a hack."
Binance's wallet labelled "Binance 14" sent 167,464 ETH and dozens of other tokens, including more than $1.6 billion of USDT, to a new address at about 20:24 UTC, according to Invezz, citing on-chain data. Seconds later a second wallet sent another 28,005 ETH to the same place. The first on-chain figure circulating was about $2.77 billion across five blockchains, investingLive reported, and later tallies rose past $3 billion. Some counts above $5 billion include bitcoin and Tron movements that have not been tied to the attacker.
Has Binance confirmed a hack?
No. Binance said on X that its teams were aware of reports of a potential security issue and were investigating, and later said user funds were "completely safe." It has not called the incident a hack or given a loss figure. Changpeng Zhao, who no longer runs the exchange, wrote that the activity looked like a hack and that, as a shareholder, he expected user funds to be fully covered. His comments are not a formal pledge from the company.
By late evening Binance had temporarily paused withdrawals on multiple networks as a precaution, investingLive said.
How did the funds move, and what got frozen?
Researchers pointed to an EIP-7702 delegation, an Ethereum feature that lets an ordinary wallet run contract code, set up by an address funded through the Tornado Cash mixer, Invezz said. Those on-chain claims are unverified. Invezz, citing CoinDesk, added that the exploiter then borrowed about 20,000 wrapped ether on Aave using the stolen USDT as collateral.
The stablecoin issuers moved fast. Tether froze more than 1.567 billion USDT, after an earlier figure of about $971 million, and Circle froze more than $800 million of USDC. About 700 million USDT left the receiving address before Tether's blacklist took effect, and more than $1 billion, mostly ether, remained unfrozen at last count. Ether cannot be frozen by an issuer.
What happened to prices?
Binance's own token, BNB, fell from about $739 to a low near $692 before recovering to about $704. Bitcoin dropped toward $78,800 and ether to about $2,265, and roughly $628 million of leveraged positions were liquidated in an hour, mostly long bets, according to CoinGlass data cited by investingLive.
If the loss is confirmed at anything near these figures, it would exceed the roughly $1.5 billion Bybit hack of February 2025. The questions for Friday are simple: how much Binance admits it lost, how it plans to pay for it, and when withdrawals resume.
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