Binance has paused withdrawals following the suspected Binance hack that drained billions of dollars from its hot wallets. The exchange said in an official post on X at 22:15 UTC on 29 Octobe
Binance has paused withdrawals following the suspected Binance hack that drained billions of dollars from its hot wallets. The exchange said in an official post on X at 22:15 UTC on 29 October that they will resume only "as soon as the security issue is fully resolved." The wording matters: an hour earlier Binance was investigating "reports of a potential security issue." It now refers to "the security issue" as a fact, though it still has not used the word hack.
The full post reads: "Our team is conducting security checks. Withdrawals will resume as soon as the security issue is fully resolved. User funds remain safe. We'll keep you updated. Thank you for your patience."
This is Binance's third public position in an hour. As FinanceFeeds reported, the exchange rewrote its first statement twice in 13 minutes. Its 21:16 UTC wording that it had "not confirmed any impact to user funds" became "User funds are completely safe" by 21:29 UTC. The withdrawal post keeps the reassurance, now as "User funds remain safe," but it drops the hedge about whether an incident happened at all.
Binance spokesperson Ross O'Leary went further in comments to TechCrunch, saying the exchange has "temporarily suspended withdrawals on multiple networks following a security incident as a precautionary measure." That is the closest Binance has come to confirming a breach. It has not named the affected networks or given a resumption time. At 23:06 UTC Binance widened the restrictions, saying Binance Alpha trading "has been temporarily suspended" and "will resume once the security issue is resolved." It has not given a loss figure or said whether the SAFU emergency fund will cover any shortfall. Founder Changpeng Zhao, who no longer runs the exchange, wrote earlier that "as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered."
The pause lands on traders who are already taking losses. Coinglass data cited by BeInCrypto shows $627.7 million in crypto liquidations in a single hour late Thursday, $606.6 million of it in long positions. Binance itself accounted for $344.8 million of that, more than half the total, ahead of Hyperliquid at $97 million and Bybit at $77.3 million.
Put those numbers next to the withdrawal pause and the problem for leveraged clients is clear. The biggest single block of forced selling happened on the venue whose customers now cannot move coins off it. BNB was at $702.97 at 22:24 UTC, down 6.9% in 24 hours, while Bitcoin traded near $78,840, according to CoinGecko.
Exchanges usually halt withdrawals after a breach to stop an attacker draining more wallets with the same access. In this case the drain did not need a fresh signature every time. On-chain data shows a Tornado Cash-funded address switched a Binance hot wallet to run its own contract through an EIP-7702 delegation. That kind of access can persist until it is revoked, so a pause while Binance rotates keys and clears delegations is defensive, not necessarily a sign of insolvency.
The contrast with Bybit is still stark. After its $1.5 billion breach in February 2025, Bybit kept withdrawals open and processed the rush, and that became its main credibility argument. Binance has chosen the opposite path, at least for now, while estimates of the total outflow keep rising. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said Tether froze "more than 1.567B USDT," and Circle says it froze more than 800 million USDC, so about $2.4 billion is now locked.
Three things will decide how the market reads the next update: a resumption time, a confirmed loss figure and a funding source, whether that is SAFU, the balance sheet or both. A restart within hours, published with reserve data, would echo the playbook Bybit used after its breach, even though Bybit has recovered only $48.4 million of the stolen funds since. A pause that stretches into Asian trading hours without numbers would turn a security incident into a confidence test. For institutional clients, the question becomes what an exchange actually guarantees.
No government agency or regulator has commented publicly. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said the company froze USDC "in coordination with law enforcement." FinanceFeeds will update this coverage when Binance or an official authority publishes verified information.
