Stablecoin issuers including Tether, Circle, Ripple and the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial have frozen more than $2.6 billion in digital assets tied to a suspected security breach at Binance, according to CryptoSlate. Total outflows from Binance hot wallets reached nearly $6 billion, with research firm Kairos estimating about $5.7 billion left the exchange, the outlet reported.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on October 29 that his company froze over $1.567 billion in USDT connected to the incident, while Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said his firm froze roughly $823 million in USDC. Ripple reportedly froze approximately $200 million in assets, World Liberty Financial restricted $27 million in its dollar-pegged token, and Paxos disclosed it froze 1,906.67 PAX Gold tokens worth more than $8 million, per CryptoSlate.
Kairos Research told the outlet that three minutes after an external address attached delegated code to a Binance hot wallet using an Ethereum account mechanism, a single transaction moved 63 tokens including 1.6 billion USDT and 167,000 ETH. A separate wallet sent 28,000 ETH to the same address, and 18,270 BTC plus 613 million USDT on Tron were shifted to new wallets, Kairos said. Investigators say the suspect behind the transfers put $60 million of USDT into Aave and pulled out close to 19,800 ETH worth roughly $45 million in borrowed funds, which led Aave to halt most Ethereum lending activity as a safeguard, per the report.
CryptoSlate noted roughly $850 million in ETH kept moving between newly created wallets even after the freezes, while 17,270 BTC in the suspected attacker's holdings remained untouched. Binance said its security teams were investigating, but the outlet reported that the total scope of the breach, the attacker's identity, and whether the compromise was internal or external remain unconfirmed.
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