Binance Pauses Withdrawals After Suspected Hack: What We Know So Far

Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange, confirmed on October 29, 2026 that it was dealing with a security incident. Users had reported that money was being drained from its wallets.

The exchange told TechCrunch that it had temporarily stopped withdrawals on multiple networks as a precaution, according to spokesperson Ross O'Leary.

Binance said it was aware of reports of a potential security issue and was investigating. It also said user funds are completely safe. TechCrunch Founder Changpeng Zhao said the company had likely been hacked, and he expected users' funds to be fully covered.

The reported losses are much larger than the company's statements suggest. Crypto watchers say at least $2 billion was drained from Binance's hot wallets. Some estimates put the losses as high as $5.7 billion. Tether has frozen about $1.56 billion related to the Binance hack, according to the same report.

What is a hot wallet?

A hot wallet is connected to the internet. It holds the digital keys that authorize transfers, and it pays for everyday withdrawals. Cold storage keeps most customer balances offline.

Think of a hot wallet as the cash drawer at a shop counter, and cold storage as the safe in the back office. A drain this size points to the cash drawers, the operational wallets that sit between the exchange's storage systems and its users.

Binance has not said whether the compromise involved signing systems, key management, or a withdrawal-processing service. The pause is the step it is using while it investigates.

A separate incident the same day

Earlier on October 29, the prediction market Polymarket briefly halted trading and paused withdrawals after a third-party company was compromised. Researchers reported that around $2 million in user funds was stolen through compromised software from DebugBear.

The two events are separate.

Binance's earlier episodes

Binance has paused withdrawals before. In 2019, it halted them for a week after a hack that took about $40 million.

In December 2022, the exchange recorded $1.9 billion in withdrawals in 24 hours, according to data firm Nansen. It temporarily paused withdrawals of USDC, a digital token designed to track the US dollar, during that period. Reuters reported on the outflow surge that same month. Earlier that year, a Reuters investigation found that Binance had served as a conduit for laundering at least $2.35 billion in illicit funds.

The company's security record also reaches beyond its own platform. In October 2022, a blockchain linked to Binance was hit by a hack in which around $100 million in cryptocurrency was stolen. BNB Chain said BSC was temporarily paused due to irregular activity.

In May 2025, Bloomberg reported that Binance and Kraken had been targets of Coinbase-like hacks, and that their internal policies and technologies repelled them. Across the industry, the largest single exchange breach on record is still Bybit's 2025 loss of $1.4 billion, which was blamed on North Korean hackers.

Separate legal matters

Other legal news also surfaced in October 2026. Australia's federal court ordered Binance's local unit to pay $6.9 million. A Russian IT specialist was sentenced to 13 years in jail on charges of financing terrorism, a case Reuters reported on October 27, 2026.

The broader context here

The broader context here is the gap between the reassurance and the open numbers. Users can be protected by solvency and reserves, meaning the assets a company holds to cover what it owes, in a way a withdrawal queue cannot. But the withdrawal queue is where users experience the incident.

The 2019 episode ended with withdrawals resuming after about a week. Whether this one follows a similar course, or whether the scale of the reported drain changes the timeline, is not yet known.