Article is by Molly White, who you might recognize from Mastodon and web3isgoinggreat.com:
https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/117526961419935070
I wrote up what we know about the Binance hack so far. By my best estimate, Binance is out around $3 billion after stablecoin issuers froze what they could. Changpeng Zhao is promising Binance will cover it, but he’s legally barred from running the company.
It turns out that watching people lose money to crypto is my kink.
Never let anyone shame you out of it.
It’s amazing that people store their life savings in other people’s wallets, lol
Isn’t that every bank?
My bank has nice plush offices I can burn to the ground if they steal it.
Yeah but FDIC insurance goes a long way in people’s mind.
Banks are well established at least.
Banks are backed by the government. That’s why people trust them.
People forgot why that is.
now updated to $6.8B.
So much for blockchain security and free money.
$6.8B is the figure they stole, but since some of the assets got frozen they are only left with $3B they can use
only
Isn’t blockchain just a way to control the transactions? Why can’t they just reverse the transactions and essentially deny the theft?
Because there is no centralized entity whom you can ask to do that, that’s the whole point. Only the change to the community controlled consensus - (most of miners, node runner, validators and users agreeing to it) can achieve that, but there is no interest in that as it would undermine one of the main principals of crypto currency and it’s cash like properties - transaction irreversibly.
A blockchain doesn’t actually provide control over a transaction, it just verifies that it happened. It’s supposed to be a long, immutable record of every transaction that has ever ocurred, which is precisely why transactions can’t be reversed. The work of verifying those transactions is performing by miners, or some other “proof of” design where you have an authority in the chain that confirms it.
Basically, it’s nothing more than a fancy receipt.
Something like this happened with Ethereium iirc and the coin split into two. One were the transaction was reverse and the OG one. But they were able to reverse the transaction because all the biggest holders decided to. Not sure if those coins stole from binance are as centralized as Ethereum was at that moment to be able to do it.
Well if you did that, then crypto would cease to be useful as a criminal currency, wouldn’t it?
They had access to 6.8, Binance froze over 3 billion, and off chain partners froze other coins. They said 3 billion or less.
They had access to 6.8, Binance froze over 3 billion
So much for blockchain security and free money. You missed the point, this wasn’t supposed to be possible, bro.
they didn’t break into a blockchain, they broke into a website. blockchains are built on hashes, nobody’s reversing hashes no matter how much you dislike blockchains.
this wasn’t supposed to be possible, bro.
hacking into websites is actually totally possible, bro. get your facts straight, bro. you don’t know what you’re talking about at all, bro.
Most bockchains have a pretty good security, some guy you gave all your money to because he pinky promised to keep it safe not so much.
Did they break the security of the blockchain or just hacked an application that stored it in a database?
they hacked the website. People who use Binance are storing their money there, instead of on a self-custody wallet
Crypto coins are a scam, and one of the main feature, decentralization, is vastly nullified by people storing their coins in a centralized wallet of someone else.
crypto works great as a currency that is difficult to tie to individuals, not as an investment.
“works great” as in… how? it’s all way too slow and volitile and cumbersome to handle the global financial system, so nobody actually uses it as currency. in what sense does it “work great?” in theory it works great, but in practice, not so much. nobody wants to pay their rent with bitcoin if the price has shifted down 20% by the time it gets processed.
in practice it’s also really easy to link your crypto transfers to you. it only takes one opsec failure and you’re not anonymous anymore. so i really don’t think it works “great.”
Etherum settles in 12 seconds and can handle >30k transactions per second across it’s layer 2s, by 2030 it aims to be capable of 10k tps on the main chain alone and enable protocol native shielded pools for private transactions.
Monero is already private and one of the most stable cryptos out there. It takes ~1 min for a single conf, but because there is no replace by fee feature, you can accept 0 conf tx for small payments.
Compared to fiat big cryptos like ₿, Ɱ, ETH tend to appreciate in value, so even if you were using them for payments without looking at the price, over a longer period, for most people the average they paid would be lower than if they used fiat, which only ever goes down in value.
look at any of the websites selling hrt without doctors’ involvement
How many people use it with its intended purpose vs people using it as an “investment”?
Wishful thinking won’t make it less of a scam
Exactly. Stocks weren’t meant to be traded as a way to make money. They were meant to represent ownership in a company that payed out dividends.
But then finance bros being finance bros, figured out they could gamble against a stock’s value and potentially make even more money.
Then it became normalized.
At least there are rules now and some oversite. It used to be a literal secret group of men, in a room, deciding value and who gets what.
How many people buy houses as an investment instead of living in them, how many people buy oil as an investment instead of using it for fuel, how many people buy gold and silver as an investmen instead of using them for jewelry or industrial applications, how many people buy dram as an investment instead of putting it in their computers… I guess it’s all a scam then? What a dumbass take. Besides, store of value is one of the intended purposes of a crypto currency, I don’t see how you can hold against it the fact that more people are opening their eyes to how valuable this property of crypto really is in the face of their life saving being vaporized by the money printer.
M2 - money supply, USD
Bitcoin supply
Monero supply
One could say the same about trucks being used as a status symbol but that doesn’t discount their utility.
They were able to recover a lot, so 3B is what they cannot recover.
Wow. Is this the biggest heist ever? Apart from Trump’s presidential grift and the SpaceX IPO ofc.
Most heists are digital nowadays because most people neglect cybersecurity. But since we’re talking cybersecurity, that’s the next big sector to invest if you ask me, especially with threat of AI and quantum computers.
Excellent point, now we will just have to wait a while for the AI bubble to burst completely and hopefully pick up some undervalued stocks
I think Kushner turns around this amount before his morning coffee. This is amateur hour.
Two posts above is Musk taking 16B of taxpayer dollars.
stable coin
looks inside
the rug-pullest mf of them all
I mean its probably not a rug pull. Most likely its a coordinated state sponsored hacking group, like the Lazarus group, who would be my bet for the big winner of this.
I’m curious how much theyll walk away with in the end.
Doesn’t the title of the article once you tap the link say who did it? Yes, yes it does.
They changed the title of the article since I commented. I am pleased that my speculation was mostly correct however.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261030033426/https://www.citationneeded.news/binance-theft/
^ archive link showing that the title used to be “Attacker gets away with up to 3$ billion from Binance.”
Ahh makes sense
Valid point. At 3 bios I suspect insider involvement tho.
Or an inside job.
About tree fitty
It was about that time I noticed this “Lazarus Group” was about 8 STORIES TALL, and was a crustacean from the Paleolithic Era!
The stable coins are the only ones not stolen, since they have a centralized authority and could freeze the assets.
they should call it bitch-coin now
There are still people who will insist it wasn’t a stupid idea to decide meaningless digital points like the ones you get for helping Pac-Man eat dots are real-life money now.
Because helping Pac-Man eat dots at least takes some effort and impose scarcity, and that’s already better than working for money another man can print for free.
As someone who also disbelieves in crypto, I’m not sure why real-life money shouldn’t be considered fraught.
Lotta comments here blaming the victims.
This was likely an instance of social engineering within Binance and nothing to do with the underlying securities, folks.
Are you saying Binance engineers always intended to trigger a steal? Because that’s exactly what I thought when I saw the headline but I’m not well informed about block-chain security.
No, I think someone obtained one of their employees’ credentials via social engineering. It’s not that hard to do, you just call someone and tell them you’re from IT and their password, or security key, or passkey or whatever is expiring and pretend to set them up with a new one or convince them to let you remote into their PC to make some kind of security update.
That’s usually how it happens.
Thank you for explaining!
Sure thing. Have a nice Saturday!
Are they really “victims” when they willingly gave their money to an unregulated not-bank?
Yes.
You may not like the product but these people still have a reasonable expectation of security, and they should.
I don’t care for AI girlfriends, but when they convince a teen to off themselves I still acknowledge that the teen is, objectively, a victim even though the product is unregulated.
someone can be a victim and the blame can lie mostly in said victim’s actions.
You may not like the product but these people still have a reasonable expectation of security
I’m a sane human being, therefore my expectancy of safety from any crypto exchange point is zero.
If I’d hold a wallet, I’d likely install the most strict firewall rules out there.
“I’m a sane human being”
Not a great start.
my expectancy of safety from any crypto exchange point is zero
Honestly, I’m skeptical of using dedicated crypto exchanges too. I have somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of my portfolio in crypto, but through a regular brokerages that deal in standard securities like stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. If I had all of my wealth in it, I’d have it all stored in a cold wallet on external media, but even that isn’t 100% foolproof.
There have been several incidents with crypto exchanges, yes. That said, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of major corporations in the US have had significant publicly infamous security breaches within the last decade, so it seems illogical to pretend as if security breaches are somehow unique to the crypto industry.
People who use crypto are not insane.
Not a great start.
Just FYI, when people say that, it rarely means self-bloating/putting themselves pedestal, it usually means insulting the thing you’re talking about, aka. “only insane would trust to hold large sums on crypto exchange points”, not that I’m super duper sane. A figure of speech
Thank you for the explanation. Have a nice Saturday.
That’s different because we don’t expect teenagers to make good decisions so we try to protect them. All Binance customers are adults.
You expect adults to make good decisions?
This is why the world is the way it is…
We’ll just have to agree to disagree. Have a nice day.
They were victims of being convinced to do that, yes.
I read they got into a container from an old laptop. If true that’s one I.T. department about to get snapped.
Yeah it was a dev ops engineer’s laptop
Fucking lol. That’s where we’re at today in terms of development and cybersecurity 🤣
Just the normal crypto issues. Buy crypto, lose money.
Can’t wait to find out it was social engineering
Hey Binance, it’s your grandson, I’m in trouble and need you to go to target to get some gift cards
Do NOT redeem
just imagine the Reddit bitcoiners typing “not your keys, not your crypto” 😂
It’s literally true though. There’s a very easy way to never have to worry about being a part of these hacks, and that’s by never leaving anything in exchange wallets.
“your keys, not your keys”
Lol.
Sharing is caring, this is good for bitcoin /s
I’m glad to no longer be in crypto. It gave me anxiety
You hear about the hardware crypto wallets with sim cards in them that read the pincode off the displays? That was a slick as shit supply chain attack:
The intial wallets discovered has crude wiring soldiered on, but later ones had custom black PCBs that looked very much like they were part of the wallets circuitry unless you knew exactly what you were looking for.
I really miss the old internet before paywalls were put up everywhere.
“Ledger is currently investigating serious allegations of tampering involving its hardware wallets sold through a Southeast Asian reseller, CryptoBilis. Reports indicate that this tampering has resulted in the theft of approximately $86 to $93 million in cryptocurrency from numerous wallets.” https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/10/09/ledger-investigates-potential-wallet-tampering-after-reports-of-usd86-million-in-crypto-stolen
Honestly, good for them.
I thought that too, until I learned it was North Korea. Probably not great that they acquired that much dark money.
Name one international this year that was worse
I’m happy to answer your question, but I don’t think I understand what you’re asking me. Can you clarify?