2% of Binance’s Total BTC Holdings Gone
Binance has halted withdrawals and deposits for the following 7 days.
Yesterday’s hack saw a total of 2 percent of all of Binance’s BTC holdings vanish into thin air. According to the official release, the event has only impacted the exchange’s BTC hot wallet. This should be somewhat reassuring, given the multitude of the attack and the serious amount of BTC that Binance is holding.
Simple math suggests that Binance currently has around $2 Billion worth of BTC on its accounts. According to BitInfoCharts, at least 188,311 BTC is held in cold wallets, which is worth around $1.1 billion. According to the release, however, these funds are not affected and safe.
Interestingly enough, the 7000 BTC which was stolen from Binance has been transferred through a single transaction. Changpeng Zhao, CEO at Binance, revealed that this transaction has been structured in a way which has managed to circumvent the exchange’s existing security checks and that it was very unfortunate that it couldn’t have been blocked. However, once executed, the transaction has triggered various alarms in Binance’s system and all withdrawals were halted immediately.
Yet, it’s worth noting that Binance has said that there may be additional affected accounts which haven’t yet been identified, which is somewhat worrying.
