Binance’s hot wallets were drained across 11 blockchains on October 29, with Elliptic estimating the theft at $6.43 billion and most funds moved within about 20 minutes. Transfers included 233.46 million XRP, large amounts of SOL and OP, and billions in assets across Ethereum and other networks. Binance estimated roughly $6.3 billion was affected, said about $3 billion had been frozen or intercepted, and pledged to cover the losses. Circle and Tether froze substantial amounts of USDC and USDT. The FBI attributed the attack to the TraderTraitor group.
Binance’s November 3 account traced the initial foothold to a fake job interview that led an engineer to install malicious code on a work computer. The attacker reportedly used an internal AI tool to expand access, stole credentials, and deployed a container from another engineer’s machine before reaching the wallet-signing service. The evidence points to abuse of Binance’s signing systems, not proof that private keys were stolen. The report does not explain how the container gained access, why the signer accepted unauthorized requests, or how valid signatures were obtained across chains. Binance’s CEO incorrectly described EIP-7702 as a multisignature protocol; the Ethereum feature enabled wallet delegation but cannot account for Bitcoin transfers. An independent security review was still pending.
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