Binance hack: 90% of stolen assets replaced, withdrawals Sunday

Binance said Saturday it had refilled 90% of the assets stolen in its $6.3 billion hack. That is up from 80% a day earlier. The exchange said it still expects to resume withdrawals on Sunday.

The remaining gap is made up of less liquid tokens. Binance says it keeps buying replacements through market and over-the-counter trades. Customer balances in Bitcoin, Ether and eight other assets are fully backed, according to the exchange's update on X.

A Binance spokesperson told Cointelegraph the refill draws on three sources: the corporate treasury, a partial use of the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) and part of the futures insurance fund.

The spokesperson said Binance will absorb the financial impact rather than users. The insurance fund, they added, stays above the required risk management levels. The statement did not say how much each source contributed, nor the fund's minimum required balance.

The theft happened Thursday and is the largest cryptocurrency hack on record, per the report. TRM Labs has attributed it to North Korea's TraderTraitor hacker group.

On Friday Binance said it had set aside $6.34 billion to cover losses, including $5 billion in the affected cryptocurrencies. Tether and Circle froze about $3 billion in affected assets after the hack. Those frozen funds are separate from Binance's replacement of stolen tokens.

CertiK told Cointelegraph on Friday it needed more information to verify the claimed $5 billion in replacement cryptocurrencies. Binance has since published a new reserves snapshot.

The exchange says the full cryptographic proof is still being generated. Its update puts the time at roughly 40 to 50 hours because of the computational workload.

The concrete checkpoint is the Sunday withdrawal restart. Until then, the numbers to track are the 90% refill figure and the reserves snapshot Binance published.

Two things remain open. The spokesperson did not quantify how much stolen crypto had been recovered. And the full zero-knowledge proof is still pending, so the $5 billion replacement claim has not yet been verified by an outside party.