Another Day, Another Billion-Dollar Bitcoin Heist

Binance lost $6.3 billion in about 20 minutes. The stablecoins got frozen. The Bitcoin is gone.

I spent years in commercial real estate lending. Moving a few million dollars took two signatures, a callback to a known phone number, and a compliance officer who did not care how busy I was.

On Thursday afternoon, someone moved $6.36 billion out of Binance in about 20 minutes.

No callback. No compliance officer. No one to call.

TRM Labs counts the theft across 10 blockchains at roughly four times the $1.5 billion taken from Bybit in February 2025, which held the record until this week. TRM and Chainalysis both attribute the attack to TraderTraitor, the North Korean hacking unit the FBI tied to Bybit.

Binance says it will cover every customer loss from its SAFU reserve and its own balance sheet.

That is a promise from a private company. It is not a guarantee from anyone.

I have never been convinced Bitcoin is more than a speculative asset. This week did not change my mind. It sharpened it. The pitch for crypto has always been that code replaces trust. Thursday showed what happens when the code works perfectly and the money still disappears.