Update: Binance Freezes $3B as Recovery Races Toward the Hack Total. Read the latest on the Binance hack. Binance says it will cover every dollar lost in the suspected Binance hack, and it ha
Update: Binance Freezes $3B as Recovery Races Toward the Hack Total. Read the latest on the Binance hack.
Binance says it will cover every dollar lost in the suspected Binance hack, and it has frozen the exchange to do it. In an official post on X at 00:13 UTC on 30 October, the exchange said: "Binance will cover all losses." In the same post it suspended all deposits and withdrawals "while our team conducts security checks, freezes funds, and works with law enforcement." It is the first time Binance has promised compensation, but it still has not said how large the loss is.
The pledge settles the question that has hung over every update since the drain began: who pays. It leaves the bigger one open, which is how much.
The statement also promises "a full post-mortem once the investigation is complete" and thanks "partners across the ecosystem who have moved quickly to help freeze affected assets." It ends: "User funds are safe."
The deposit freeze is new. Binance first paused withdrawals at 22:15 UTC and Binance Alpha trading at 23:06 UTC. Halting deposits as well shuts the exchange's on-chain doors in both directions, consistent with rotating keys and clearing compromised wallet permissions before anything moves again. Binance did not give a timeline or say whether spot and futures trading continues.
The pledge follows a 23:22 UTC post in which Binance put its first official number on the incident, rejecting the widely reported $1.8 billion figure: "the current verified total frozen is $2.54 billion."
Most of that comes from the stablecoin issuers. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said Tether froze "more than 1.567B USDT," and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said Circle froze more than 800 million USDC "in coordination with law enforcement." Together that is roughly $2.37 billion. That leaves about $170 million frozen by other parties Binance has not named.
Set against the outflow estimates, those figures show what Binance's promise could cost. FinanceFeeds' on-chain review tracked about $3.3 billion leaving Binance hot wallets on Ethereum. On that basis, $2.54 billion frozen covers roughly 77% and leaves a gap of around $760 million. Decrypt's tally of at least $5.57 billion across Ethereum, Bitcoin and Tron would cut the frozen share to about 46% and push the uncovered amount above $3 billion. Frozen tokens are also not returned tokens; recovery usually runs through issuer or court processes that take weeks.
The first backstop is the SAFU emergency fund, which Binance converted into $1 billion of Bitcoin earlier this year. On the lower outflow estimate, SAFU alone could close the gap. On the higher one, Binance would have to draw on its corporate balance sheet. Its statement does not say which source it will use, and that is the detail institutional counterparties will press for first.
There is precedent for a promise like this holding. Binance covered its 7,000 BTC loss in 2019 from SAFU, and Bybit made clients whole within days of its $1.5 billion breach in February 2025, even though it has since recovered only $48.4 million of the stolen funds. The difference this time is scale: even the low estimate is more than twice Bybit's loss.
BNB traded at $694.37 at 00:14 UTC, down 8.6% in 24 hours, and Bitcoin at $77,690, according to CoinGecko. The next official signals to watch are a confirmed loss figure, the funding source behind "cover all losses," and a reopening timeline for deposits and withdrawals. No government agency or regulator has commented publicly. For background on what exchange-level protection actually covers, see our guide to what Binance, Coinbase and Kraken guarantee.
This story follows our earlier coverage of how Binance rewrote its first statement twice in 13 minutes. FinanceFeeds will update as Binance or an official authority publishes verified information.
