The Daily Wolf | Binance lost $6.3 billion in the biggest crypto theft ever

Binance resumed withdrawals after a 48-hour freeze following the $6.3 billion theft. The exchange said withdrawals had been restored across all 15 phase-one network groups, while it continued testing other networks. Scott Milker said Binance’s outflows had reached about $6 billion and were just over $4.65 billion at his latest check, while deposits had exceeded $1 billion. He put the outflows at less than 4% of Binance’s more than $150 billion in customer assets, arguing the exchange had the balance sheet to absorb the loss. He rejected comparisons with FTX, which he described as a fraud that did not have the money to cover its losses.

Milker said law enforcement agencies had confirmed that North Korea’s Lazarus Group, specifically its TraderTraitor operation, was behind the hack. He dismissed claims that Binance engineered the theft to conceal a balance-sheet shortfall as conspiracy theories unsupported by evidence. Binance’s reserves snapshot had become independently verifiable for 10 tokens after the exchange completed its zero-knowledge proof. That verification applied to those 10 tokens; the synopsis did not say it covered every asset or resolved all questions about the incident.

The discussion drew a distinction between AI’s possible role in the theft and its reported use afterward. Milker said there was almost no evidence that AI had been used in the Binance hack, although AI was reportedly used to obscure the movement of stolen funds. Separately, he said Chainalysis disclosed that an attacker had used AI-driven techniques to access internal systems and customer data. These claims describe different activity and were not presented as proof that AI enabled the Binance theft itself.

Bitcoin fell about 4–5% after the hack, while Intel fell 30% and Alphabet and Amazon briefly dropped about 12% each. The host said Bitcoin had outperformed and contrasted its decline with the possibility that a theft of this scale might once have pushed the price down 20% in an hour. Bitcoin ETFs recorded reported outflows of $643 million on Friday: $233.7 million from BlackRock, $201 million from Fidelity and $129.5 million from ARK B. The host cautioned that ETF flows can reverse and tend to respond to market movements, making flows from Monday through Wednesday worth watching rather than treating Friday’s withdrawals as a settled trend.

An ICE notice dated October 30 listed objections from 50 issuers to unaffiliated third-party tokens tracking company shares. The host said Nasdaq was encouraging listed companies to opt out of tokenization plans involving Kraken, but predicted companies would eventually tokenize because they would have to. The episode presented a tension between issuers’ objections to outside parties creating share-tracking tokens and the host’s view that tokenization would become unavoidable; it did not describe the notice as a final resolution of that dispute.

The crypto industry had contributed more than $200 million toward the 2026 midterms, including about $154 million from Fairshake. The host said Fairshake’s spending primarily supported crypto-friendly Republicans and included efforts to defeat Sherrod Brown. Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen had spent $22.5 million of his own money, largely supporting Democrats, including a $4 million contribution to support Brown. The host expected political gridlock after the midterms, said a Republican-controlled Senate remained possible and characterized the Clarity Act as largely dead.