longer.blue

Crypto: Made by con men for use by criminals. PERIOD. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has suspended all withdrawals after hackers stole about $6.3 billion in digital assets in what experts call the largest crypto theft on record. The attack more than quadruples the previous record, North Korea’s $1.5 billion hack of the exchange Bybit in February 2025. Binance first believed hackers got in through a compromised engineer’s laptop but now says it has found “additional points of breach” in what it calls a “complex hack.” The company says it will “cover all losses” and expects to let customers withdraw money again within two days. About half of the stolen assets have been frozen with help from other crypto firms, including Tether and Circle, but TRM Labs estimates about $2.4 billion has already been moved “beyond any issuer’s reach.” “It hurts, but we will survive,” founder Changpeng Zhao wrote on X. Several crypto research firms say the hack was carried out by North Korea’s elite hacking unit, which Western intelligence says funds the regime’s nuclear weapons program. TRM Labs, Chainalysis, and Check Point all linked the attack to a North Korean group known as TraderTraitor, also called the Lazarus Group, which was blamed for the Bybit heist. TRM Labs’ Ari Redbord called the hack a “watershed moment” unlike anything the industry has seen. Check Point warned that “attackers no longer need the vault keys” and are instead targeting the systems and people who control them. Western security agencies have previously said North Korea uses stolen crypto to pay for its nuclear and missile programs, though the regime has denied involvement in past hacks. Binance says it is working with law enforcement “to confirm the identity of these criminals and bring them to justice.” The hack hits close to Trump, who pardoned Binance’s founder and whose family’s crypto business has partnered with the exchange. Binance pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering laws and paid $4.3 billion in penalties, and Zhao served four months in federal prison before Trump pardoned him. Binance has since formed a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture and a major source of the president’s wealth, which says it helped freeze stolen funds. Trump has pledged to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet,” but as the New York Times notes, the industry “remains a wild west, vulnerable to hacks and fraud.” After the hack, Bitcoin fell below $80,000 for the first time in more than a month, and shares of Coinbase, Robinhood, and Strategy dropped more than 6% in premarket trading. Zhao even suggested Binance could sell its stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, now worth more than $1 billion, to cover customer losses.” from Aaron Parnas newsletter.