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The Binance hack is way bigger than any other known heist in the crypto world
Yahoo Finance • • general
Key Points:
- Binance reported a $6.3 billion theft, temporarily suspending customer withdrawals and freezing 44% of the stolen funds, causing a sharp decline in Bitcoin, other digital assets, and related stocks.
- The Binance hack surpasses previous major crypto thefts in scale but differs from the FTX collapse, where founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged and convicted of fraud involving an $8 billion shortfall.
- Notable past crypto thefts include a $1.5 billion hack of Bybit in 2025 by North Korean-linked hackers, who manipulated transaction approvals to steal ether.
- In 2022, the Ronin Network lost $625 million to the Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacking group, while Poly Network’s $611 million theft in 2021 was mostly returned by the attacker to expose a vulnerability.
- An unconfirmed $3.5 billion loss occurred in 2020 from Chinese bitcoin mining pool LuBian, suspected to involve exploitation of private key generation weaknesses and identified only in 2023.
