One laptop. Six point three billion dollars. That is the entire story.
Binance says the breach may have started on a compromised engineer's laptop. The world's largest crypto exchange, custodian of $144 billion, was reportedly undone by the same device you use to lose arguments on Reddit.
Analysts at TRM Labs and Chainalysis point to North Korea's TraderTraitor unit. Kim Jong Un's hackers took roughly four times what they took from Bybit. Pyongyang now has a better quarter than your 401(k) and your entire family tree combined.
The hackers needed about 20 minutes across ten blockchains. Your last Binance withdrawal took longer than that, and it only involved $212.
Tether froze 1.567 billion USDT. Circle froze 800 million USDC. Stablecoin issuers moved faster than anyone at Binance, which is like praising the fire department for arriving after the house is gone.
About $3 billion is frozen. The rest, mostly BTC and ETH, is somewhere in North Korea, being spent on whatever North Korea spends money on. Probably better laptops.
Changpeng Zhao and Binance say user funds are safe. They will cover losses from the SAFU fund, about $1.17 billion, plus company money. SAFU stands for Secure Asset Fund for Users. Someone sat in a meeting and named it that. Someone clapped.
Fundstrat's Sean Farrell says this does not appear to be a solvency event. Reassuring. Nobody has ever been wrong about that sentence before.
Withdrawals are expected back by Sunday. Retail traders will line up the second the button turns green, to find out whether their money is in the exchange or in a Pyongyang rocket program.
Binance spent years telling you it was the safest place for your coins. Kim Jong Un agreed and moved in.
Photo by Kanchanara on Unsplash
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