Arkham Puts Binance Hack at $6.01 Billion, With $2.9 Billion Still Movable

Ethereum Accounts for the Largest Share

Arkham’s chain-by-chain breakdown attributed $3.739 billion to Ethereum, including $1.875 billion in $USDT, $823 million in $USDC and 197,540 $ETH valued at $457.33 million. Bitcoin accounted for another 18,270.2 $BTC, valued at $1.467 billion.

The firm counted $628.09 million on Tron, comprising 612.73 million $USDT and 46.39 million $TRX; $95.90 million on Solana; and a combined $77.70 million across Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, Optimism and Base. Those dollar values are Arkham’s estimates, rather than an exchange-confirmed accounting of losses.

An Ethereum transaction record supports a major part of that account: at 4:24 p.m. ET on Oct. 29, a transaction moved about 167,464 $ETH and 63 ERC-20 tokens from a wallet Etherscan labels Binance 14 to an address it labels Binance Hot Wallet Exploiter 2. The token transfers included approximately 1.615 billion $USDT. That transaction establishes a large individual outflow, not the full nine-chain loss estimate.

Arkham placed the wider drain between 4:10 p.m. and 7:05 p.m. ET on Oct. 29.

Freezes Leave Billions Beyond Issuers’ Reach

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on Oct. 29 that the issuer had frozen more than 1.567 billion $USDT related to a potential Binance hack. Arkham’s later freeze breakdown counted $1.768 billion in $USDT across Ethereum, Tron and Avalanche, alongside $824.56 million in $USDC frozen by Circle and other immobilized tokens.

Arkham said $2.9 billion in $ETH, $BTC, $TRX, SOL and altcoins remained movable. Its frozen and movable figures are separate estimates, not a reconciliation of the original $6.01 billion taken.

Binance’s preliminary explanation points to an operational breach: the exchange said a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop may have allowed an attacker into a service container to submit unauthorized withdrawals. It said it had found no evidence of a wallet private-key leak and had revoked the affected address authorization.

Binance said it would publish a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation was complete and an updated Proof of Reserves after remediation.