Binance pauses withdrawals amid suspected multi-billion-dollar crypto theft

Binance suspends withdrawals after suspected breach

Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, has halted withdrawals on multiple networks in response to a suspected security incident, according to TechCrunch. Users began reporting that funds were disappearing from Binance wallets before the company acknowledged the problem in an emailed statement, saying it was "aware of reports of a potential security issue" and was actively investigating.

A Binance spokesperson, Ross O'Leary, told TechCrunch that the withdrawal suspensions were a precautionary measure. In its statement, the exchange urged users to ignore unofficial links, messages and requests for account information, warning that scams typically follow incidents of this kind.

How much may have been stolen

Estimates of the damage vary widely and remain unconfirmed. Crypto watchers cited by TechCrunch put the minimum at around $2 billion taken from Binance's hot wallets, the internet-connected wallets that exchanges use to process day-to-day withdrawals. Some estimates run as high as $5.7 billion, and TechCrunch reports that the theft may still be ongoing. Binance has not released a figure of its own, and there is no indication yet of who is behind the attack or whether the company has received any communication from the attackers.

Stablecoin issuers step in

Two of the industry's largest stablecoin operators have already intervened. According to TechCrunch, Circle froze roughly $800 million in Tether as it moved through its networks, while Tether froze a further $1.56 billion connected to the incident. Because major stablecoin issuers can block individual addresses, these freezes are among the few effective countermeasures available once large volumes of tokens are stolen, and together they cover a significant share of the funds apparently involved.

What Binance and its founder are saying

Changpeng Zhao, who founded Binance but no longer runs the company and remains its largest shareholder, posted on X hours before the exchange's statement that Binance had likely been hacked. He said he expects user funds to be "fully covered," but offered no explanation of how that would work. Binance's own statement, by contrast, insisted that user funds are "completely safe."

A potential record

If the losses are confirmed in the billions, the incident would rank among the largest cryptocurrency thefts in history, according to the theft-tracking leaderboards TechCrunch cites. The current benchmark is the $1.4 billion stolen from the exchange Bybit in a single 2025 breach, an attack blamed on North Korean hackers. Under the higher estimates circulating for Binance, this incident would exceed that record several times over.

A separate Polymarket incident

In what appears to be an unrelated event the same day, prediction market Polymarket briefly stopped trading and paused withdrawals after confirming that a third-party company had been compromised. Security researchers told TechCrunch that around $2 million in user funds was stolen after attackers compromised software developed by a firm called DebugBear.

Why it matters

An exchange the size of Binance losing billions from its hot wallets would be unprecedented in the crypto industry's history. The incident also puts the sector's emergency playbook through a live test: issuer-level freezes have already locked up well over $2 billion in stablecoins, but any remaining losses may sit in assets that cannot be frozen once moved. For users, the immediate questions are how quickly withdrawals will be restored and whether Binance can back Zhao's assurance that losses will be covered, an assurance given without any explanation of the mechanism. Until Binance confirms actual figures, the gap between the exchange's "completely safe" messaging and reports of an ongoing multi-billion-dollar drain remains the central uncertainty in a fast-moving story.