Star Xu Calls for Exchanges to Coordinate Security After Binance Breach

A Binance hot-wallet incident with an estimated $6.3 billion impact has prompted OKX founder and CEO Star Xu to urge crypto exchanges to coordinate defenses and tighten transaction checks.

In a post published Monday, Nov. 2, at 10:47 a.m. ET (15:47 UTC), Xu grouped security incidents involving Bybit, Bitget and Binance as a warning for the industry. “No system is absolutely secure,” he wrote.

Xu outlined real-time settlement among verified exchanges, extra checks or delays on large withdrawal requests headed to unverified addresses, added review of transactions granting smart-contract permissions, plus safeguards during cryptographic signing, shared incident warnings, suspicious-fund tracking and prompt temporary freezes when lawful.

Xu said the evidence did not establish a leak of Binance’s hot-wallet private key; Binance’s own review also found no evidence of a wallet-key leak. The exchange’s initial hypothesis involved possible compromise of a DevOps engineer’s laptop; later, Binance cited additional breach points.

Binance timed the hot-wallet breach to about 4:05 p.m. ET on Oct. 29 (20:05 UTC), with affected token assets valued at an estimated $6.3 billion. On Nov. 2, Binance said company funds had replenished roughly 95% of the affected balance. That percentage reflects balance restoration, not the amount of crypto recovered from attackers.