Binance Sets Aside $6.34B for Hack Losses, Buys Missing Tokens

Binance said at 6:55 a.m. ET Friday that it has reserved more than $6.34 billion of company money to cover Thursday's theft and has begun recovering affected assets for users.

That covers its estimate of about $6.3 billion taken, the largest crypto theft on record by TRM Labs' count. In a post on X, Binance said $5 billion of the reserve is already held in "the exact token assets that were impacted." It is buying the rest on exchanges and through over-the-counter (OTC) desks, which arrange large private trades. Binance said that step "can take longer because some tokens may have low liquidity and OTC settlement also takes time."

Why the tokens have to match

How it works: a customer who kept 1,000 units of a small token on Binance is owed 1,000 units of that token, not its dollar value. Co-founder Yi He said on X that the SAFU fund, Binance's emergency reserve for users, and the firm's own holdings are mostly in assets such as bitcoin and ether, and that it is buying "all the stolen altcoins in fully matching amounts." Buying thinly traded coins in size can push their prices up, which slows the work.

The $6.34 billion does not count about $3 billion that partners have frozen on-chain, Binance said. Those coins can't move, but still have to be recovered.

The cause is also less settled than it looked overnight. Binance said at 4:47 a.m. ET that its first finding pointed to a compromised laptop, but its team "has uncovered additional points of breach."

Withdrawals stay paused. Binance said at 12:36 a.m. ET that it expects to restart them within 48 hours, after "a security revamp of the withdrawal service." That window runs to about 12:36 a.m. ET Sunday. Deposits are working normally, Binance said.

BNB, the token tied to Binance's BNB Chain, traded at $698 at 12:03 p.m. ET, down 6.8% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.

In our opinion: Binance has now put a dollar figure on its promise, and it covers the whole loss before any frozen money comes back. The cost lands on Binance's own balance sheet, while holders of small tokens it must buy back could see sharp price swings in the meantime. The tests to watch are the withdrawal restart before Sunday and the updated Proof of Reserves, Binance's public tally of what it holds against what it owes customers.