Arkham Puts Binance Hack at $6.01 Billion, With $2.9 Billion Still Movable

Blockchain analytics firm Arkham estimates that attackers took $6.01 billion from Binance hot wallets across nine chains on Oct. 29, with about $2.9 billion in assets still movable despite billions in freezes.

In its Oct. 30 assessment, Arkham put frozen assets at $2.80 billion. Binance separately estimated the incident’s total impact at around $6.3 billion and said approximately $3 billion had been frozen. The exchange has not endorsed Arkham’s exact tally.

For customers, Binance’s commitment is to cover all losses using its SAFU fund and company funds. “User funds are safe,” the exchange said. Its security update said deposits and withdrawals were temporarily suspended while checks continued, leaving customers unable to withdraw even as the exchange promised to absorb the losses.

Ethereum Accounts for the Largest Share

Arkham’s chain-by-chain breakdown attributed $3.739 billion to Ethereum, including $1.875 billion in $USDT, $823 million in $USDC and 197,540 $ETH valued at $457.33 million. Bitcoin accounted for another 18,270.2 $BTC, valued at $1.467 billion.

The firm counted $628.09 million on Tron, comprising 612.73 million $USDT and 46.39 million $TRX; $95.90 million on Solana; and a combined $77.70 million across Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, Optimism and Base. Those dollar values are Arkham’s estimates, rather than an exchange-confirmed accounting of losses.

An Ethereum transaction record supports a major part of that account: at 4:24 p.m. ET on Oct. 29, a transaction moved about 167,464 $ETH and 63 ERC-20 tokens from a wallet Etherscan labels Binance 14 to an address it labels Binance Hot Wallet Exploiter 2. The token transfers included approximately 1.615 billion $USDT. That transaction establishes a large individual outflow, not the full nine-chain loss estimate.

Arkham placed the wider drain between 4:10 p.m. and 7:05 p.m. ET on Oct. 29.

Freezes Leave Billions Beyond Issuers’ Reach

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on Oct. 29 that the issuer had frozen more than 1.567 billion $USDT related to a potential Binance hack. Arkham’s later freeze breakdown counted $1.768 billion in $USDT across Ethereum, Tron and Avalanche, alongside $824.56 million in $USDC frozen by Circle and other immobilized tokens.

Arkham said $2.9 billion in $ETH, $BTC, $TRX, SOL and altcoins remained movable. Its frozen and movable figures are separate estimates, not a reconciliation of the original $6.01 billion taken.

Binance’s preliminary explanation points to an operational breach: the exchange said a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop may have allowed an attacker into a service container to submit unauthorized withdrawals. It said it had found no evidence of a wallet private-key leak and had revoked the affected address authorization.

Binance said it would publish a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation was complete and an updated Proof of Reserves after remediation.