US Accuses North Korea of Stealing $6 Billion from Binance

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has accused North Korea of being responsible for stealing more than $6 billion in digital assets from the Binance cryptocurrency trading platform. The bureau stated that malicious actors from North Korea were working to conceal the origin of the stolen assets by converting them into Ethereum, and added that it expects the stolen assets to undergo additional stages of money laundering. U.S. investigators assert that they have identified the party responsible for this massive theft: a group of North Korean cyber hackers known as “Trader Triathlete.” The FBI published a list of approximately 500 Ethereum addresses used by members of “Trader Triathlete” to launder the stolen assets, and called on cryptocurrency exchanges, decentralized finance services, and blockchain analytics firms to block transactions linked to these addresses. On Thursday evening, Binance announced that it had been the victim of a security breach with estimated financial losses of around $6.3 billion, an incident that triggered turmoil in the digital asset market and renewed concerns about exchanges’ ability to safeguard users’ funds. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency trading platform, reported that its coverage of losses resulting from the cyberattack had risen to 90%, up from 80% in its previous security update, in a move aimed at rebuilding its damaged digital reserves and protecting users’ balances. Observers considered this attack possibly the largest of its kind ever, surpassing in scale the $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit platform in February 2025, an incident that was at the time attributed to hackers linked to North Korea.