Largest Digital Asset Hack in History: $6.3 Billion Drained from Binance — Binance Hot Wallet Hack Incident Report

This document is a research paper prepared by DSRV Research on the Binance hot wallet hack of October 29, 2026 (UTC). It is based on publicly available materials, including Binance’s official announcements, analyses by blockchain analytics firms, and media reports.

At 20:05 on October 29, unauthorized transfers began from the hot wallets of Binance, the world’s largest digital asset exchange. The attacker had already been inside Binance’s internal systems for about three hours. Approximately $6.3 billion (about KRW 8.4 trillion) was drained, which Binance put at $6.34 billion in its November 3 report. Estimates from analytics firms differ slightly: $6.36 billion by TRM Labs, about $6.4 billion by Chainalysis, and $6.43 billion by Elliptic. That is more than four times the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in February last year, making it the largest digital asset hack on record. The attack targeted hot wallets, which are exchange wallets kept connected to the internet at all times to handle frequent customer deposits and withdrawals. According to TRM Labs, assets were drained from Binance hot wallets on 10 blockchains (Elliptic counts 11). On Ethereum, the attacker took control of a single hot wallet and moved approximately 167,000 ETH and 63 types of tokens out in one transaction. According to CoinDesk, this wallet was “Binance 14,” and about $2.5 billion left it within four minutes. On the other nine chains, assets went out through ordinary signed transfers. According to Binance’s report, 18,270 BTC left its Bitcoin hot wallet, 233.46 million XRP left five hot wallets between 20:05 and 20:09, and approximately 970,500 SOL and 44.2 million OP were drained from its Solana and Optimism hot wallets. The attacker used valid signatures from Binance’s wallets.