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TRM Labs report banner reading North Korea Steals USD 6.36 Billion From Binance in the Largest Hack in History, dated Oct. 29, 2026.
Image: TRM Labs (fair use). The blockchain intelligence firm's report on the Binance theft, published Oct. 29, 2026.

Threat Intel

TRM Labs Says North Korea's TraderTraitor Took About $6.36 Billion From Binance Across 10 Blockchains, and the Evidence Points to the Exchange's Hot Wallet Signing System

Binance says a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop let an attacker reach a service container and submit withdrawals, and it has found no sign of a private key leak. TRM says 50 pre-signed EIP-7702 authorizations turned an Ethereum hot wallet into an attacker's sweeper, and that treasury teams should alert on any such delegation.

Priya Shah, Threat IntelSingapore6 min read

SINGAPORE - An attacker moved about $6.36 billion out of Binance wallets on 10 blockchains on Thursday evening, most of it in roughly 20 minutes starting at 20:05 UTC, in what the blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs called the largest crypto theft on record. TRM attributed the attack, with high confidence, to TraderTraitor, the North Korean hacking unit the FBI named as responsible for the $1.5 billion Bybit theft in February 2025.

Binance said early Friday that its initial investigation suggests the incident "may involve a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions." The exchange said it had found "no evidence of any wallet private key leak," put the estimated impact at around $6.3 billion with about $3 billion frozen on-chain, and said it would cover all losses from its SAFU fund and company funds. It suspended deposits and withdrawals, revoked the affected address authorization and promised a detailed technical post-mortem.

The two accounts point at the same place. Binance describes an attacker submitting withdrawals from inside its environment, not stealing keys. TRM, reading the blockchain, concluded that the most likely explanation is that the attacker "gained the ability to make Binance's hot wallet signing system sign transactions of its choosing across chains."

Ten chains in half an hour

TRM Labs graph of transfers from Binance-attributed wallets to attacker-controlled addresses on Oct. 29, 2026.
Image: TRM Labs (fair use).TRM's overview graph of the flows out of Binance wallets.

TRM valued each transfer at the price of the asset when it was taken. Ethereum accounts for about $3.79 billion, including 200,630 ETH and 185 other tokens, among them 1.875 billion USDT, 823 million USDC and 88.5 million RLUSD. Bitcoin outflows total 18,270 BTC, about $1.47 billion. Tron lost 612.7 million USDT and 46.4 million TRX, about $628 million; the XRP Ledger 233.46 million XRP, about $296 million; and Solana 970,500 SOL, about $96 million. Arbitrum, Optimism and Base combine to about $39 million, Avalanche about $28 million and Polygon about $10 million.

The first theft came on the XRP Ledger, where five Binance wallets sent their XRP to one attacker address between 20:05 and 20:09 UTC. Solana and Optimism followed shortly after 20:10. At 20:20, a Binance Bitcoin hot wallet sent 18,270 BTC to an attacker address that began splitting the funds into 1,000 BTC and 100 BTC pieces in the same block, a peel chain that makes funds harder to follow. Within two minutes, a Tron hot wallet sent its USDT and TRX. A second wave around 23:05 UTC reached Binance wallets on Avalanche and Polygon.

"These wallets use different chains, key types and signing schemes," TRM wrote. All of them produced valid signatures for the attacker within about half an hour. Binance has not published a root cause.

How one delegation emptied a hot wallet

TRM Labs text describing the 50 pre-signed EIP-7702 authorizations and the evidence pointing to Binance's signing infrastructure.
Image: TRM Labs (fair use).TRM's account of the Ethereum takeover and why it points to signing infrastructure.

On Ethereum, the attacker used EIP-7702, a feature added in the Pectra upgrade in May 2025 that lets an ordinary wallet hand its behavior to a smart contract by signing an authorization. At 20:20 UTC, the operator submitted one transaction containing 50 authorizations, each signed by the Binance hot wallet and each pointing it to a sweeper contract that takes instructions only from the operator. An authorization is valid only at the wallet's current transaction count, or nonce, and a busy exchange wallet's count keeps climbing. By preparing signatures for 50 consecutive counts, the attacker made sure one would match. One did.

Three minutes and 24 seconds later, the operator told the wallet to send its entire balance to an attacker address: 167,464 ETH and 63 tokens, including 1.615 billion USDT. The delegation stayed in place, so new deposits were swept again at 20:41, 20:59, 21:04, 21:44, 22:39 and 23:56 UTC. Because the wallet also served as the executor of a separate Binance smart account, the attacker could pull 823 million USDC from that account as well; Circle froze it shortly afterward.

TRM said the batch of pre-signed authorizations suggests the attacker's access "may have been limited in time, or that signatures had to be requested through a system." Preparation began at least 36 hours earlier, with three small Tornado Cash withdrawals funding the operator wallet on the morning of Oct. 28, a first version of the attack code tested on two wallets early on Oct. 29 and a rehearsal on a third wallet four hours before the same code was installed on the Binance hot wallet.

The race against the freezes

Tether froze 971.1 million USDT in the main receiving wallet at 21:01 UTC, 37 minutes after the main sweep, and later sweeps landed in the frozen wallet, which now holds 1.175 billion USDT. Circle froze the 823 million USDC at 21:04 UTC, Ripple froze 40.5 million of the 88.5 million RLUSD at 22:01 and World Liberty Financial froze 27.8 million USD1 at 22:10. At 00:08 UTC, Arbitrum's Security Council forced 8,426 ETH and 74.6 million ARB, about $30 million, out of the attacker's wallet. TRM counted about $2.7 billion frozen as of 00:30 UTC on Friday.

The attacker paid heavily to outrun those freezes. About 325 million USDT was sold to market makers through UniswapX and other intent-based contracts for about 122,300 ETH, a discount of more than 10 percent, and a second wallet supplied 60 million USDT to the lending protocol Aave and borrowed about 19,760 ETH against it. The attacker still holds more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, about $2.4 billion beyond any issuer's reach, and TRM expects cross-chain bridges, swap services and over-the-counter brokers to come next.

What defenders can use

TRM Labs guidance headed What exchanges and compliance teams should do now.
Image: TRM Labs (fair use).TRM's recommendations for exchanges, treasury teams and market makers.

TRM's guidance is specific. Treasury teams should monitor Ethereum-compatible wallets for EIP-7702 delegations, which appear "as code at an address that should have none," alert immediately on any such delegation and keep a tested, pre-approved way to sign a revocation. Signing policies should reject EIP-7702 authorizations unless they are expected, and "a request for many authorizations across a range of transaction counts should be treated as an indicator of compromise." Signing infrastructure and approval paths should be separated by chain and wallet tier, since in this case one actor obtained valid signatures for wallets on 10 chains within hours. Exchanges, swap services and OTC desks should screen deposits against the attacker addresses TRM has labeled.

For security teams outside crypto, the first link in Binance's account is the familiar one: an engineer's endpoint with a path into a production container that could ask a signing service for withdrawals. Binance has said it will publish the full post-mortem once the facts are verified.

Sources:


Priya Shah covers threat intelligence, intrusion analysis, and adversary tradecraft for SOCtember from Singapore.

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