North Korea’s hackers have walked away from the Binance heist with a Bitcoin pile that most corporate treasuries can’t match. The FBI on Oct. 31 formally blamed North Korea for the theft of m
North Korea’s hackers have walked away from the Binance heist with a Bitcoin pile that most corporate treasuries can’t match.
The FBI on Oct. 31 formally blamed North Korea for the theft of more than $6 billion from Binance, naming the state-backed hacking group it tracks as TraderTraitor.
The TRM Labs puts total losses at about $6.36 billion across ten blockchains. Of that, 18,270 BTC was sent to a single address and then split across 19 wallets.
The FBI had published a list of cryptocurrency addresses linked to the attack and urged anyone with relevant information to contact a local FBI field office or submit a report through its Internet Crime Complaint Center at IC3.gov.
TraderTraitor was not a new designation for the bureau. The FBI had also used the same name in February 2025, when it attributed the $1.5 billion Bybit hack to North Korea.
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At about $78,500 per coin, the stolen Bitcoin is worth roughly around $1.4 billion.
That is nearly three times North Korea’s total merchandise exports last year, which the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency put at $468.59 million, a North-Korean daily reported.
The haul is also about 59% larger than Tesla’s 11,509 BTC, and it sits just 442 coins short of SpaceX’s 18,712 BTC.
The figure is 2.3 times the approximately 7,820 Bitcoin held in the reserve wallet disclosed by El Salvador’s National Bitcoin Office.
The Central American country began accumulating Bitcoin in September 2021 under President Nayib Bukele, making it the first nation to adopt the cryptocurrency as legal tender.
About $3 billion of the stolen assets has been frozen so far, most of it stablecoins. Tether locked about $1.77 billion and Circle about $825 million.
Bitcoin has no issuer that can block a wallet. It can only be stopped once it hits an exchange or custodian, Seoul Economic Daily noted. The FBI has published the 19 Bitcoin addresses and urged service providers to block transactions with them.
“A freeze stops the money from moving, and recovery follows through legal process,” Ari Redbord of TRM Labs told CNBC.
The market took the hit in stride. Bitcoin slid about 5%, from roughly $80,769 before the theft to near $76,400 by Friday afternoon.
“One of the largest crypto exchanges gets hacked for $6 billion and Bitcoin sold off less than 5%? Bullish,” investor Anthony Pompliano wrote.
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