Binance Recovers 90% of $6.3B Hack, Plans Sunday Withdrawals

The world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange is scrambling to recover from the largest crypto theft in history. On Saturday, Binance announced it had replaced 90% of the assets stolen in a massive $6.3 billion hack — up from 80% just a day before.

An exchange is a website where people buy and sell cryptocurrencies, a bit like a stock market for digital money. Binance is the largest one in the world. A hack means criminals broke into its systems and stole customers' digital assets.

Here are the key facts:

• The theft totaled $6.3 billion — the biggest crypto hack ever recorded.
• Investigators (TRM Labs) blamed a North Korean hacker group called TraderTraitor.
• Binance set aside $6.34 billion to cover losses, including $5 billion in the actual stolen coins.
• Partner companies Tether and Circle froze about $3 billion in affected assets (meaning they locked the funds so hackers couldn't use them).

Importantly, Binance promised that customers won't lose money. "Binance will absorb the financial impact of the stolen funds, not users," a spokesperson said. To pay for this, the company is using a mix of its own money plus two emergency pots:

• SAFU (Secure Asset Fund for Users) — a rainy-day fund built to protect customers in emergencies.
• A futures insurance fund — money set aside to cover losses in high-risk trading.

Binance says balances in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and eight other coins are now fully backed, meaning there's enough real money to cover what customers hold. The leftover gap involves smaller, harder-to-buy coins, which Binance is still purchasing.

One catch: a security firm called CertiK said it still needs more proof to confirm Binance's claims. Binance says the full cryptographic proof (a mathematical way to prove the funds exist without revealing private details) takes 40 to 50 hours to generate.

The bottom line: Binance is working fast to restore trust and plans to let customers withdraw their money again on Sunday — while reassuring everyone that the losses will be covered by the company, not by users.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://cointelegraph.com/news/binance-hack-90-percent-replenished?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound