The world’s largest crypto exchange failed to keep its customers’ money safe. According to estimates from Chainalysis and Glassnode, between $5 billion and $6 billion has left Binance wallets — roughly four times last year’s record-breaking Bybit disaster. Deposits and withdrawals are frozen, Tether, Circle and Ripple are scrambling to block the linked addresses, and BNB is dragging the entire market down with it. The exchange still hasn’t named its own final loss figure — it just hands out the routine promises to “cover everything,” while millions of customers sit in front of a dead withdrawal button with no access to their own money.
For years this platform lectured the industry on security, waved its Proof of Reserves reports around, collected certificates and turned the phrase “Funds are SAFU” into a religious mantra. And here is what all those presentations are worth: the budget of a small country has been carried out of the world’s main crypto fortress, while account holders are left waiting at a locked door. Whatever the internal reasons, it is the exchange — and no one else — that answers to its customers for this money.
Binance’s official excuse is already in place: supposedly, it’s all the fault of a compromised laptop belonging to a single DevOps engineer, through which the attacker reached a service container. But the longer you read that line, the funnier it gets. We recently took Vanta apart along with the showy SOC 2 badges in the footers of financial websites — and spelled out that behind any “impenetrable cloud architecture” there ultimately sits a living person with a work laptop. That person steps away for coffee, taps “approve” on push notifications at three in the morning without looking just to make them stop, and carries hardware with production access in an ordinary backpack down dark alleys. So an exchange the size of a small country built its defenses in such a way that billions of customer dollars depended on one single laptop. That is not an excuse — it is a full confession of professional incompetence.
But Who Says It Was Stolen?
Market-adjacent analysts are already nodding toward North Korea, as usual. Pinning every multibillion-dollar failure on phantom hackers from North Korea is like blaming crop failures and every other misfortune on witchcraft in the Middle Ages: convenient, familiar and, above all, there is nothing to prove. Pyongyang is hardly going to hold a press conference or sue for defamation.
But let’s keep a cool head. Imagine: you take out a large loan from a bank, and a month later you call them and say, “Sorry, my employee’s laptop was hacked, and the money went to North Korea.” The bank will not take your word for it for a single second. First of all, it will demand the procedural paperwork: where is the police report and the number of the criminal case? Where is the record of the seizure of that very laptop? Where is the report of an independent forensic examination showing traces of the break-in, and where are the witness statements signed under a warning of criminal liability for knowingly false testimony? Only when all of that is on the table does a theft theory even exist in legal terms.
It’s exactly the same story with Binance. Your money was with them. As of this minute, the public has been shown no criminal case, no sealed hardware and no independent forensic report — only a cheerful post by the exchange itself and rough estimates from private analytics shops. And as long as there is no independent evidence, to any thinking person the picture looks extremely simple: customers’ money was entrusted to Binance — and today Binance is not giving it back. Logically, until the opposite is proven on paper, it is the exchange itself that owes you billions, not some mythical hacker. Prove it was otherwise — or give the money back.
We recently reviewed the non-custodial wallets Tangem and Mitilena — pros and cons included. If you want your money to stay in your own pocket rather than depend on someone else’s exchange, use wallets like these. For example, Mitilena.