Binance said Friday that it has set aside more than $6.34 billion in company funds to cover losses from its hack, and that $5 billion of that total is already held in the same tokens that were stolen.

“The $5 billion is held in the exact token assets that are required. These assets are in Binance custody,” a Binance spokesperson told Cointelegraph.

The company did not disclose when it acquired the assets. The spokesperson declined to reveal the wallet addresses, citing security reasons, but said the holdings would appear in the exchange’s next proof-of-reserves report, which shows the assets it holds to back customer balances.

Binance added that it submits weekly reports on its company funds to the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA), the financial regulator of Abu Dhabi Global Market in the United Arab Emirates, and said that reporting requirement predated the hack.

The exchange has yet to confirm which tokens it still needs to purchase, when those purchases will be completed, or how much of the stolen crypto has been recovered. Binance has not said when its next proof-of-reserves report — where the set-aside holdings are due to appear — will be published, making it the disclosure to watch for verification of the $5 billion claim.

The company confirmed Friday that it had suffered a $6.3 billion hack, the largest cryptocurrency theft on record, and publicized the confirmation in a post on X. Blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs said funds were drained from Binance wallets across 10 blockchains on Thursday and attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking group. The $6.34 billion in company funds Binance says it has set aside slightly exceeds that confirmed loss.

Binance said about $3 billion in affected assets has been frozen with help from blockchain partners, and that those frozen assets were excluded from the company funds set aside to cover losses.

In related coverage, Cointelegraph reported that Ethereum’s EIP-7702 did not cause the hack but may have amplified losses.

CertiK awaits more details to verify Binance’s $5 billion holdings

CertiK told Cointelegraph that it needed more information from Binance to assess whether the claimed $5 billion in tokens matching those stolen could be independently verified on-chain.

Earlier Friday, CertiK CEO Ronghui Gu said that approximately $3 billion in frozen assets, together with Binance’s $1.17 billion emergency fund, could cover about 66% of the reported losses, leaving a potential $2.1 billion gap. Gu said that estimated shortfall represents about 1.3% of Binance’s reported $165 billion in exchange reserves, which include the assets backing customer balances.

Binance founders cite revenue and existing holdings

Blockchain analytics company Nansen told Cointelegraph that it could not verify what funds Binance had available beyond its roughly $1.16 billion emergency fund, or where the money to cover the remaining losses would come from.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao said Friday in a post on X that the company’s SpaceX holdings alone, linked to a $500 million investment in Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, were worth more than $1 billion. Co-founder Yi He said that the exchange’s revenue for the year was sufficient to cover the hack losses and that the company did not need to sell its stake in SpaceX.

Zhao also said Binance accumulates the cryptocurrencies it lists because customers can pay trading fees in those tokens. In a separate post, he said Gulf, Binance’s partner in Thailand, had offered financial support. Zhao did not say whether Binance would draw on the offer.

Zhao stepped down as CEO in 2023 and later served four months in a US prison over anti-money-laundering violations. He remains a major Binance shareholder, and Forbes has estimated his personal fortune at approximately $115 billion.