You don’t need to trade cryptocurrencies to hear about Binance. His name has become a great reference to a market that has grown to attract millions of people around the world. we talk The largest cryptocurrency exchange on the planetA platform where its users can buy, sell and hold digital assets. But behind these actions lies something that doesn’t appear in the quote, and it’s just as important: the trust we place in a company when we decide to put our money in its custody.
On October 29, that confidence faced a test that was hard to ignore. Binance suffered a cyber attack in which criminals managed to steal around $6.3 billion worth of cryptocurrency, considered the largest known theft of digital assets. The platform suspended the withdrawal for about two days, and the FBI later blamed the North Korea-linked Trader Traitor group for the operation. The scale of the attack was already extraordinary, but there was another equally important question: what would happen if clients regained the ability to access their funds.
When Binance began reactivating withdrawals on Sunday, November 1, its customers began transferring a tremendous amount of money. According to the Wall Street Journal, They withdrew about $7.4 billionAlthough this figure reflects gross withdrawals, not net outflows of capital: around 2.7 billion were deposited over the same period. Balances on the platform were about $4.7 billion lower, an amount Reuters puts at a more precise $4.72 billion. This is equivalent to about 3% of the assets held by Binance, a ratio that should be kept in mind before interpreting the response.
Platform trust is verified
The question is inevitable: are we experiencing a loss of general confidence? Available data do not allow us to go that far, although this is not to suggest minimizing the importance of customer feedback. Reuters reports that analysts think confidence has largely been maintained, while the company itself maintains that withdrawals are starting to stabilize after an initial rebound. FTX’s history helps put this into perspective: after its collapse in 2022, Binance recorded a net outflow of nearly $6 billion in 72 hours, more than today.
Faced with this situation, the exchange has promised that its users will not assume the damage caused by the attack. According to the company, it is using resources from their coffers, its SAFU Emergency Fund and part of an insurance fund to replace damaged assets, a process it claims is about 95% complete. The remaining 5% corresponds mainly to less liquid cryptocurrencies, which are more difficult to acquire in large quantities. In addition, it has released a cryptographic proof of reserve that allows a minimum one-to-one coverage verification for ten assets, although this is not the same as recovering the stolen money, nor does it constitute a comprehensive audit of the company.
We can have a blockchain network that accurately records activities and, at the same time, a platform whose security systems have been compromised. This is a distinction between the infrastructure of a financial system and the companies that use it to manage their clients’ money. In this case, the available information indicates a problem in the Binance environment.
To understand the skepticism that surrounds this sector, it is enough to remember some of its most notorious episodes, although not all of them had the same cause. FTX collapses in 2022 amid fraud involving clients’ funds; Also that year, TerraUSD’s loss of parity caused the LUNA token to plummet and its ecosystem to sink. Later in 2025, Bybit was attacked Allowing the theft of approximately $1.5 billionNorth Korean hackers blamed by FBI. So we have seen business fraud, economic design failures and computer attacks, three different problems that have contributed to questioning the security of the ecosystem.
And if we look at Binance itself, we see that its problems did not start with this attack. In 2023, the company pleaded guilty before a US court to violations of anti-money laundering, economic sanctions and registration obligations to provide certain financial services and agreed to pay approximately $4.3 billion. Its founder, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to violating anti-money laundering obligations. This approach differed from the civil case that the SEC dropped in May 2025 against several entities associated with Binance, including its US platform, without ruling on the merits of the charges.
Scrutiny also extends to EuropeWhere Binance has encountered obstacles in continuing to provide certain services At the end of the transitional period of the MICA regulation, on July 1, the platform did not receive the necessary authorization to operate under that framework after Greece withdrew its application. In France, its old registration has become invalid and the company has notified customers of restrictions in several countries. In October, the Financial Times reported that regulators were examining the use of an exception that would allow European users to serve on their own initiative when requesting services.
There is a statistic of the largest known cryptocurrency theft, but the question that remains open cannot be solved with an account. Binance promises to estimate the cost of the attack, although the outflow of funds, although significant, has not yet created a general panic situation. This does not trivialize your clients’ response: when we leave our assets in the hands of an intermediary, we have to trust both their ability to protect them and their response if something goes wrong.
Featured Image | Bastian Riccardi
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