In brief
In a statement released on Saturday, the FBI held North Korea’s “TraderTraitor” group responsible for robbing Binance of $6.3 billion in crypto assets, describing the laundering process into Ethereum. Binance announced it had used its Secure Asset Fund for Users and other internal reserves to buy back 90% of the stolen tokens. The agency urged other virtual‑asset service providers to block related transactions and publicly indexed suspect addresses.
The FBI on October 30 announced that a hacking collective tied to North Korea, dubbed “TraderTraitor,” was responsible for a record $6.3 billion theft from the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. The claim followed months of investigation into the largest known smuggling operation of virtual assets.
The FBI’s statement outlined that the North Korean actors moved the stolen funds mainly into the cryptocurrency Ethereum, layering the assets in several steps with the goal of obscuring their origin. The agency identified specific digital addresses that the exchange and other VASP providers should monitor and block to prevent further laundering.
In the same announcement, the FBI called on all virtual‑asset service providers to take defensive action, providing a list of suspected transaction hubs for them to flag. The statement also highlighted that TraderTraitor had previously been implicated in a $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit platform in February of 2025.
Binance reacted to the incident with an emergency coverage plan. Using funds from its $1 billion Secure Asset Fund for Users, the Futures Insurance Fund and its corporate treasury, the exchange purchased billions of dollars’ worth of stolen tokens to replace the assets lost in the breach.
The company’s public statement, posted on X, read that it had “replaced 90 percent of the amount stolen by using company money to buy new tokens. The remaining 10 percent consists of less liquid tokens, meaning they may take longer to buy, it added.”
We will continue to buy the remaining relevant token assets… until the covered amount reaches 100 percent for all tokens. Binance will absorb the financial impact of these stolen funds, not our users,
