NORTH KOREA EMPTIED $6.3 BILLION OUT OF BINANCE IN 20 MINUTES

The FBI said on October 31 that North Korea's TraderTraitor unit took $6.3 billion out of Binance, the largest crypto heist ever recorded. Most of it moved in about 20 minutes. Co-CEO Richard Teng described a compromised laptop and malware written to delete evidence of its own activity, which is a hell of a thing to admit about the world's biggest exchange. The same crew held the old record, $1.5 billion from Bybit in February 2025. Then the politics got weird. Hours after the bureau named Pyongyang, Trump was asked about it at a Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago and said we don't know if it's North Korea, per AP and Al Jazeera. He had already hedged in the Oval Office the day before with "we're looking at that." So the FBI has an attribution, a list of wallet addresses and a request that exchanges freeze them, and the President has a shrug. Binance, to its credit, paid. It set aside more than $6.34 billion of company funds, said it had replaced 90% of the stolen assets by Saturday and roughly 95% by Sunday, with the stragglers being illiquid tokens nobody can buy in bulk. Withdrawals reopened in phases starting with bitcoin on November 1. Customers thanked them by yanking $5.8 billion off the platform in 24 hours, according to DefiLlama.

Why you should give a shit: Binance can refill a $6.3 billion hole out of petty cash, which should tell you exactly whose money that is, and North Korea just proved it can take it faster than your bank clears a check.