Binance lost $6.3 billion and wants a medal for finding most of it under the couch cushions.
Here is the key detail. Binance says it "covered" 90% of the stolen assets. CNBC notes that does not mean it recovered 90% of the funds from the attacker. The thieves still have the money. Binance bought replacements with its own cash.
That is not recovery. That is a guy whose car got stolen buying a new car and calling it a comeback.
The money came from Binance's roughly $1 billion SAFU reserve, plus its Futures insurance fund and corporate treasury. SAFU stands for Secure Asset Fund for Users. Someone sat in a conference room and made that acronym work. Then someone stole six times its size.
Withdrawals are back, in phases. Bitcoin first. Then Ether, BNB, XRP, Dogecoin. Dogecoin got a security clearance. Think about that.
Some outlets now say coverage hit 95%. The number climbed from 80 to 90 to 95 in about two days. Binance's coverage is the only chart in crypto that goes up on schedule.
The FBI has reportedly linked the attack to North Korean hackers. So the world's largest crypto exchange got cleaned out by a country that cannot reliably keep its lights on. Retail traders will call this a bullish sign of adoption.
Co-CEO Richard Teng said the company is taking "a careful approach." Careful. Six billion dollars walked out of the hot wallets, and now we are being careful. The door is closed, and the horse is on a different continent.
Users who rushed to pull funds out the minute the gates reopened deserve respect. That is the most disciplined risk management a retail trader has ever shown. It is also the only kind.
The rest of you will leave your coins on the exchange that just lost $6.3 billion. You'll do it because the withdrawal page loaded fast. Your portfolio is now backed by 90% of a promise and 100% of a Dogecoin security review.
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