Most of the US$6.36 billion stolen from Binance on 29 October 2026 was moved in just 20 minutes.
According to TRM Labs, the breach is now the largest crypto hack on record, with losses more than four times the US$1.5 billion stolen from Bybit in February 2025.
The scale of the Binance attack puts some of the industry’s most notorious breaches into perspective. How do earlier hacks compare?
Our updated ranking looks at the biggest crypto thefts in history, measured by their reported value at the time, including the infamous Mt. Gox collapse more than a decade ago.
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, said an attacker used a DevOps engineer’s compromised laptop to reach a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawals.
The exchange said it found no sign of a private key leak, while TRM assessed that the attacker had instead gained control of its hot wallet signing system.
Most of the US$6.36 billion that TRM traced left Binance wallets across ten blockchains in about 20 minutes.
The FBI attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, a finding questioned by US President Donald Trump and rejected by North Korea as a US attempt to damage its image.
Attackers drained one of Bybit’s Ethereum cold wallets in February 2025 after disguising a malicious transaction as a routine one so that signers approved it.
Just like Binance’s, the FBI also attributed the theft to North Korea, and the haul stood as the largest crypto hack until Binance’s breach.
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