On Saturday, October 31, the FBI blamed North Korea’s TraderTraitor hacking group for stealing more than $6 billion in crypto assets from Binance, while the exchange said it had covered about 95% of affected customer holdings and planned to restart withdrawals in stages on Sunday.
The theft happened on October 29, and Binance estimated its impact at about $6.3 billion. The FBI alert names North Korea as responsible and uses “TraderTraitor” to refer to the group’s activity. The FBI said it and its law-enforcement partners had seen the hackers changing the stolen assets mainly into ether.
It warned that more efforts to hide the funds were expected through decentralized-finance platforms and instant-swap services. The FBI urged crypto businesses and other service providers to block transactions involving crypto wallet addresses linked to the stolen funds. It published a list of those addresses in its alert.
Binance’s latest update said the amount it had “covered” had reached roughly 95%, up from about 90%. This means Binance had restored backing for affected customer assets, not recovered that share of the stolen crypto from the attackers. The exchange said the remaining 5% involved tokens that were less liquid and took longer to obtain.
It said users would not bear the financial impact. For the first withdrawal phase, Binance scheduled selected assets on 15 networks to become available between 06:00 and 09:00 UTC on November 1. More assets and networks would follow after checks were completed.