Nearly $2.8 Billion Tied to Binance Theft Frozen by Nov. 3

Nearly $2.8 billion tied to Binance’s Oct. 30 hot-wallet theft had been frozen by Nov. 3, showing the scale of measures to block further movement.

About $2.8 billion had been frozen as of 11:30 a.m. ET Tuesday, Nov. 3 (16:30 UTC). A freeze blocks transfers but does not itself return funds to Binance.

Tether froze more than 1.567 billion of its Tether (USDT) tokens. Circle froze about $823 million in USD Coin (USDC), putting the two issuers’ combined total above $2.39 billion.

On Oct. 31, the FBI attributed the theft of more than $6 billion in virtual assets to North Korean hacking group TraderTraitor. The FBI, the U.S. Secret Service and the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division urged crypto services to block transactions linked to more than 600 addresses on Ethereum, close to 20 on Bitcoin and one on Solana.

Elliptic, Chainalysis, TRM Labs and SlowMist tracked addresses and transfers. Chainalysis also linked some Binance-related funds to assets stolen from Bitget the previous month.

Arbitrum’s security committee moved assets worth about $30.5 million from an attacker-controlled address into a restricted wallet. Moving them again requires committee action or an Arbitrum DAO vote. Optimism governance moved about $5 million in assets out of an attacker address. Binance has sought the return of both pools through governance proposals, a process that may take weeks.

Binance co-CEO 何一 said World Liberty Financial froze about $27 million in USD1 and about $2 million worth of WLFI; co-founder Zach Witkoff confirmed the move. Aave paused new deposits and borrowing across hundreds of markets operated by its DAO after the attacker deposited about $60 million in USDT and borrowed roughly 19,762 WETH, then valued at $44.6 million. Withdrawals, repayments and liquidations remained available, and the borrowed WETH stayed under the attacker’s control.

Coinbase offered help blocking transfers to compromised wallets and contacted Binance. Bybit CEO Ben Zhou offered support and said the exchange’s systems, trading and withdrawals were operating normally. OKX CEO Star called for shared security standards and coordinated incident response among exchanges.

The open issue is whether assets still outside freezes can be intercepted as they move through over-the-counter channels, mixing services or exchanges and recovered.