Only Abu Dhabi's Regulator Has Spoken on the Binance Hack, While Washington Stays Silent and Rivals Offer Help
The FSRA says it is monitoring, US agencies have not commented, exchange peers offer support, lawyers doubt the SAFU pledge is binding, and here is what Binance tells customers.
Friday, October 30, 2026/4 min read
Twenty hours after the biggest theft in crypto's history, one financial regulator had said anything on the record. Abu Dhabi's Financial Services Regulatory Authority, which licenses Binance's global platform through the Abu Dhabi Global Market, said on Friday that it was aware of a security incident involving unauthorised withdrawals of assets, that it was engaging closely with Binance and monitoring the situation, and that client interests and market integrity were its priorities, Gulf News reported. It gave no further detail.
Everywhere else, the official silence was the story. This piece picks up from our account of Binance's $6.3 billion estimate and looks at who in authority has spoken, how the industry reacted, and what the exchange tells its customers.
What have US regulators said about the Binance hack?
Nothing public, as of mid afternoon UTC on Friday. The Justice Department and the FBI did not respond to AFP's requests for comment. No statement has appeared from the SEC, the CFTC or the Treasury, and no member of Congress has issued one that we can find. Binance says it is coordinating with law enforcement without naming agencies; a source told Cointelegraph the FBI is involved, which the bureau has not confirmed. The FBI attributed the Bybit theft to North Korea's TraderTraitor within five days in February 2025. It has not done so here, and the North Korea claims remain those of private firms such as TRM Labs, Chainalysis and Elliptic.
The backdrop makes a quick response unlikely. The Clarity Act, which would have set a federal framework for crypto markets, failed a Senate procedural vote in September over conflict-of-interest rules for elected officials, as NBC News recalled on Friday, and the midterms are three days away.
Abu Dhabi, Europe and Asia
Abu Dhabi matters because it is where Binance's global platform is regulated. A Binance spokesperson told Cointelegraph that the company already reports weekly on its corporate funds to the FSRA under a requirement that predates the hack, and that the $5 billion it says it holds in matching tokens will appear in its next proof of reserves. Neither CertiK nor Nansen has been able to verify that $5 billion on-chain; CertiK's Ronghui Gu estimated a potential gap of about $2.1 billion if the frozen assets and the emergency fund are all Binance has.
We found no statement from the European Commission, ESMA, the UK's FCA, Dubai's VARA, Singapore's MAS, Hong Kong's SFC or the Japanese and Korean regulators by Friday afternoon. Joshua Chu, co-chair of the Hong Kong Web3 Association, told Reuters the aftermath would run on four fronts: regulators protecting the public, law enforcement, civil litigation and ecosystem players refusing to become a route for stolen funds.
How the industry reacted
Rivals closed ranks rather than circled. Bybit's Ben Zhou said his exchange was unaffected and offered Binance support; OKX founder Star Xu called for coordinated security standards, instant settlement between verified exchanges, extra checks on large withdrawals to unknown addresses and faster freezing of stolen assets, CoinDesk reported. Coinbase and Binance.US said they were not affected. The stablecoin issuers did the practical work: Tether, Circle, Ripple, First Digital and World Liberty Financial froze what they could, and Arbitrum's security council moved tokens out of the attacker's reach.
Lawyers were less reassuring. Three partners at the London firm Edwin Coe told FinanceFeeds that Binance's pledge to cover losses should not be read as legally binding, that its standard user terms limit its liability and make no commitment to use the SAFU fund, and that a customer's rights may depend on which Binance entity and which version of the terms applied.
What Binance is telling its users
The exchange's instructions, as stated on its own channels and reported by TechCrunch, Euronews and Decrypt, are these. Deposits reopened on Friday morning. Withdrawals remain suspended while the service is rebuilt and tested; co-chief executive Richard Teng said on Friday afternoon he aims to restore them within about 40 hours, before a Sunday deadline. Customer balances were not touched, Binance says, because the breach hit a hot wallet managed separately from user assets, and every confirmed loss will be covered from the more than $6.34 billion of company funds it has reserved. A full proof of reserves is due by Monday 2 November and a technical post-mortem will follow. From its first post at about 21:15 UTC on Thursday, Binance has also told users to ignore unofficial links and anyone asking for account details, because scammers move fastest after a hack.
That is the whole of the official guidance. Whether any regulator asks for more, and whether the FBI names the attacker as it did with Bybit, will decide whether this stays a company's crisis or becomes a policy one.
Published in The Outspoken Digest
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