Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, will cover every dollar lost in this week's hack with its own money, CEO Richard Teng said in a video address on Friday, adding that customer funds were never touched.

"We are committed to covering all hacked losses through our company funds. Your assets are safe," Teng said, according to a transcript he shared on X (Twitter).

An update on the security incident. pic.twitter.com/qn2804fO5z

— Richard Teng (@_RichardTeng) October 30, 2026

The breach targeted one of the exchange's own hot wallets — internet-connected wallets used for day-to-day transfers, as opposed to offline cold storage — earlier this week, and blockchain analytics firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis have attributed the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking group that U.S. authorities have linked to the Lazarus Group — in what TRM Labs has described as the largest hack in history. Binance paused withdrawals after discovering the incident and has been working to restore them, while the attacker has continued shifting funds, including through the Tron network.

The exchange has reserved more than $6.34 billion of company funds to cover the stolen assets, Teng said. Of that total, $5 billion is already held in the exact tokens taken in the attack, including USDC, USDT, BTC, ETH and BNB. The remainder is being acquired through market and over-the-counter channels.

Teng said the hack did not touch customer funds. "We never use any customer funds, so they are not impacted," he said, adding that most user assets are held in cold wallets and are moved into a hot wallet only when a user withdraws. He attributed the company's ability to absorb a loss of this size to its practice of keeping much of its operating earnings in crypto.

Binance had earlier said it would cover all losses from its SAFU emergency fund — an insurance reserve the exchange established in 2018 — and company funds.

The company aims to restore withdrawals by Sunday and to publish a full proof of reserves report — an attestation meant to demonstrate that an exchange's onchain holdings cover customer liabilities — by Monday, with an initial view available before then, Teng said. In the meantime, it is conducting a full security review covering endpoints, cloud infrastructure, key management and signing.

How the attack worked

Teng said the hack "was not carried out by one person." Binance initially traced the breach to a compromised laptop but has since identified additional points of entry. The attacker also used a self-destruct mechanism that destroyed tooling and traces along the way, making the incident harder to investigate, he said.

According to Teng, the attacker leveraged EIP-7702, an Ethereum feature introduced in the network's 2025 Pectra upgrade that lets standard wallets run smart contract code, to obtain onchain execution approval over a hot wallet. "That delegation did not pass through our normal approval controls," he said — the reason Binance paused withdrawals to rebuild and retest its infrastructure.

The attacker is still moving funds

Stolen funds have continued to move. Between 11:37 a.m. and 12:12 p.m. ET on Friday, a Tron wallet that Arkham attributes to the hacker sent about 5.19 million TRX, worth roughly $1.73 million, to 12 addresses, according to Arkham data.

Aave unfreezes all markets

Decentralized lending protocol Aave — where the attacker borrowed ETH against USDT while racing stablecoin freezes, according to TRM Labs — said on Friday that it had unfrozen all markets across its V3 and V4 deployments. The protocol had frozen the markets as a precaution after the first reports of the hack, pausing new deposits and borrowing while withdrawals and repayments continued as normal.

Update following the Binance incident: All markets are now unfrozen across Aave V3 and V4. They were frozen as a precaution after initial reports, which paused new deposits and borrows while withdrawals and repayments continued as normal. Aave contracts were unaffected by the…

— Aave (@aave) October 30, 2026

"Aave was unaffected, and all positions remain overcollateralized," founder Stani Kulechov wrote.

'It hurts, but we survive'

Binance co-founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao said that while the $6.3 billion theft is the largest in dollar terms, it is not the largest in Bitcoin terms, pointing to Mt. Gox's loss of 650,000 BTC — more than 5% of the supply. Unlike at Mt. Gox and FTX, where nearly all users were affected, Binance is covering the losses itself, he said.

"It hurts, but we survive," Zhao wrote.

Originally reported by Decrypt.