Recap: How Binance’s record $6.3B hack unfolded

This article summarizes Cointelegraph’s coverage of the Binance hack as it unfolded. See the full timeline for detailed updates here.

Hackers stole about $6.3 billion from Binance on Thursday, in what is now the largest cryptocurrency theft on record.

As with Bybit’s $1.5 billion loss in February 2025 and September’s Bitget breach, onchain investigators attributed Binance’s record-breaking exploit to North Korea-backed hackers.

By Friday morning, the world’s largest exchange said investigators had found additional breach points after initially suspecting that an engineer’s compromised laptop was a possible entry point.

“To be clear: the attacker did not simply use one engineer’s permissions, and this was not a single ‘one-click’ action,” said Binance co-CEO Richard Teng. “Our investigation has not attributed responsibility to any individual.”