The attacker who drained Binance late on Thursday broke 18,270 stolen bitcoin $BTC$78,436.48 into 19 separate piles within minutes, then left them alone.
At 20:20 UTC, Binance’s hot wallet sent just over 18,270 $BTC to one address in 11 transactions, all confirmed in block 973,732. A hot wallet is the internet-connected wallet an exchange uses to pay out customer withdrawals. The coins were worth about $1.4 billion at early Friday prices, or more than two and a half times the 7,000 $BTC Binance lost in its 2019 hack (though bitcoin traded under $5,000 at the time).
The transactions that split the coins up were confirmed in block 973,732 too, right after the deposits into the receiving address.
CoinDesk followed every output using mempool.space data. The coins went through a so-called peel chain, where each transaction carves 1,000 $BTC off into a fresh address and passes the rest to the next hop.
Some leftovers were merged back together and split again. One last sweep gathered the odd amounts into a wallet holding 832.5 $BTC.
Twenty-eight minutes later, in block 973,738, a final 437.7 $BTC landed in a 19th address.
Seventeen wallets now hold exactly 1,000 $BTC each, one holds 832.5 $BTC and one holds 437.7 $BTC. As of 04:23 UTC Friday, none of the 19 had sent a single coin.
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