Circle Freezes $1.1 Billion in USDC Tied to Binance Breach

Circle, the issuer of USD Coin (USDC), froze about $1.1 billion in USDC tied to Binance’s Oct. 29 hot-wallet breach, showing how a stablecoin issuer can block tokens during a crypto emergency.

Binance placed the compromise at about 4:05 p.m. ET (20:05 UTC) Oct. 29. Its Nov. 3 update valued affected assets at roughly $6.34 billion and put frozen or intercepted assets at $2.85 billion, subject to reconciliation and market-price changes. Binance said 98% of affected token assets had been replenished as of Oct. 31.

Circle said the freeze was coordinated with law enforcement in a Nov. 5 statement. During the incident, an attacker supplied $60 million in Tether (USDT) to Aave V3 Ethereum Core and borrowed 19,762 wrapped Ether (WETH), valued at about $44.6 million at the time. Aave froze reserves across its networks.

The April 18 Kelp DAO bridge exploit released 116,500 rsETH, then worth about $292 million, and Aave froze 11 markets listing rsETH or wrsETH. The incidents involved different assets and response measures, so the available figures do not establish that Binance caused less DeFi fallout.