THE NATIONAL · 2026-10-30 13:21 UTC

Binance's $6.3bn hack exposes crypto's dependence on the middlemen it was built to replace

Binance suffered a $6.3 billion hack on Thursday evening after a DevOps engineer's laptop was compromised, leading to unauthorized withdrawals. Stablecoin issuers (Tether, Circle, Ripple, World Liberty Financial) froze nearly $3 billion of stolen assets within hours, while Bitcoin and Ether remained unrecoverable, exposing crypto's reliance on centralized intermediaries. The attacker converted $60 million of frozen USDT to wrapped Ether via Aave lending protocol minutes before the freeze, recovering only about $45 million of the $6.3 billion stolen.

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