Binance restarts withdrawals after $6.3bn heist blamed on North Korea
Binance has begun restoring customer withdrawals after hackers stole about $6.3bn in cryptocurrency in what authorities have described as a record theft. The exchange said it resumed some services on Sunday after suspending them following Thursday's breach, while security checks and an internal investigation continued. Withdrawals are being reopened in stages, with Bitcoin, Ether and some stablecoin services among the first to return.
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The company said it had replaced about 95% of the affected assets and would absorb the financial impact rather than pass losses on to users. In a statement posted on X, Binance said customers whose transactions fail should try again after a short wait because high demand may cause delays. It added that further services would reopen as checks were completed and that teams were working with law enforcement and industry partners to trace and recover the stolen funds.
The FBI said on Saturday that North Korea was responsible for the theft and identified the operation as cyber-activity it tracks under the name TraderTraitor. The agency said investigators had seen the stolen assets being converted mainly into ether, the token used on the Ethereum network. It warned that further laundering was likely through decentralised finance platforms and instant cryptocurrency exchange services, which can make tracing funds more difficult.
The case matters because of both the scale of the theft and the speed with which the stolen assets appear to have been moved. A loss of this size is significant even in the volatile cryptocurrency sector, where exchanges are expected to maintain strong security and liquidity while handling large volumes of customer funds. The incident also adds to concerns about state-linked cyber operations targeting digital assets as a source of revenue.
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Binance initially said a compromised employee laptop may have enabled the intrusion, but later said investigators had found additional points of breach. The company said its inquiry was still under way and that it would publish a detailed report once it was complete. The FBI also linked the same actors to the theft of about $1.5bn from another cryptocurrency exchange in February 2025, suggesting a continuing pattern of attacks attributed to the same group.
What remains unclear is how much of the stolen cryptocurrency can ultimately be recovered and whether further services will reopen without disruption. It is also not yet clear how the breach was carried out in full or how much of the laundering trail investigators can follow through decentralised platforms. For now, the exchange is restoring access step by step while authorities and industry partners continue tracing the funds.
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