Binance Says $6.34 Billion Was Hit; the Reported $15 Unlocked One Wallet
The $2.5 billion is one Ethereum transaction, the $6.34 billion is everything Binance says was affected, and the $15 is a Bloomberg-reported fee for a permission the attackers could already sign for. Here is how the figures fit, and what they mean for exchange customers and self-custody holders.
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Binance's own initial report, published Tuesday, Nov. 3, names a hijacked internal signing service and an Ethereum feature called EIP-7702 as the machinery of the theft. It never mentions a fee. The $15 that dominated this week's coverage appears in none of the primary documents (Binance, Blockaid, TRM, Elliptic); it traces to Bloomberg's report, relayed by other outlets.
On Thursday, Oct. 29, 2026, attackers moved about $6.34 billion, Binance's estimate, out of the exchange's wallets. On Friday, Nov. 6, Bloomberg reported that the delegation transaction at the center of the story reportedly cost about $15.
The numbers measure different things. The $6.34 billion is everything affected. The $2.5 billion is one Ethereum transaction out of one wallet, known as Binance 14. And the $15, a Bloomberg figure no primary document confirms, paid to record a permission the attackers could already sign for, because they controlled the service that signs for that wallet.
Put $15 beside $2.5 billion and you get one part in 167 million, a ratio that makes a vivid headline and a poor explanation. Nine of 11 headlines paired the $15 with the haul, seven of them with the $2.5 billion figure, and ProtoThema put "$6.3bn" and "$15" together, which reads as the price of the whole theft.
Fifty permissions, one of which was valid
Binance 14 is a hot wallet, an internet-connected wallet an exchange uses to pay withdrawals. On Ethereum it is an externally owned account, or EOA: a plain wallet controlled by a key, with a nonce, its running count of transactions.
EIP-7702, shipped in Ethereum's Pectra upgrade in May 2025, lets such an account point at a piece of contract code. That pointer is a delegation. Per the EIP-7702 text, a valid authorization writes "0xef0100 || address" into the account's code, and it must be signed by the wallet's own key.
Here the key was effectively in the attackers' hands. Blockaid says Binance's "own signing infrastructure, under the attacker's control, signed an EIP-7702 authorization" handing the wallet to an attacker-deployed sweeper.
The attacker rehearsed the delegate-and-sweep sequence on wallets it controlled, at "$2 to $6" each time, and deployed the sweeper used on Binance at 15:59 UTC on Oct. 29. At 20:20:59, one transaction carried 50 authorizations, one for every nonce from 18,914,775 to 18,914,824, each naming the sweeper.
Forty-nine were invalid by design, and Blockaid explains why:
"Binance 14 was still paying out withdrawals, so the attacker could not know which nonce would be current and signed a window instead."
Blockaid, blockchain security firm, incident report
Here the reported $15 enters. The EIP says The transaction sender will pay for all authorization tuples, regardless of validity or duplication.
It charges 25,000 gas per authorization plus a 21,000 base, so 50 cost at least 1,271,000 gas. With ether near $2,300 to $2,350, per TRM, the reported $15 is about 0.0064 to 0.0065 ETH, implying a gas price of at most roughly 5 gwei. Plausible for a quiet network, but a consistency check, not a confirmation.
The sweep followed at 20:24:23, three minutes and 24 seconds later. It sent 167,464 ETH, 1.615 billion USDT and about 60 other tokens to a fresh address, leaving Binance 14 with 1 ETH.
Then the delegation kept working. At 20:41:23 the attacker pulled 823 million USDC through a Circle smart account the wallet owns, and at 21:44 it swept 200 million USDT and 13 other tokens from new deposits.
Shutting it off was hard. Binance's wallet used multi-party computation (MPC), so "there was no single private key that could be used to immediately revoke the malicious EIP-7702 authorizations." Rotating keys does not help, Blockaid says, because the delegation belongs to the address. The cure is a new authorization from the same wallet pointing at the zero address, which came at 00:10 UTC on Oct. 30. The delegation had lived 3 hours 49 minutes.
The totals disagree by 1.4%; the $2.5 billion is something else
Binance says about $6.34 billion was affected, and Elliptic says $6.43 billion, a gap of 1.4%. Neither explains the gap. Elliptic's total already leaves out $169 million it believes was Binance moving its own funds, and TRM values each transfer at the moment it happened ($6.23 billion at current prices).
The table sorts the figures by what each measures.
| Figure | Who | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| ~$2.5 billion ($2.53 billion per Elliptic) | Blockaid, Elliptic; reported by Bloomberg | One Ethereum transaction from Binance 14 at 20:24 UTC on Oct. 29 |
| ~$6.34 billion (earlier "about $6.3 billion") | Binance | Everything Binance says was affected; about $2.85 billion frozen or intercepted |
| ~$6.36 billion ($6.23 billion at current prices) | TRM Labs | Transfers out of Binance wallets on ten blockchains, valued at the time of each transfer |
| $6.43 billion | Elliptic | Same event on 11 blockchains; excludes $169 million it believes was Binance moving its own funds |
| ~$3.6 billion | Attributed to Elliptic by ProtoThema and ForkLog | Moved with the same delegation; matches Elliptic's Ethereum total of $3.80 billion minus $174 million sent without any delegation |
| About $15 | Bloomberg, as relayed | Network fee for the delegation transaction; not stated in Binance's, Blockaid's, TRM's or Elliptic's documents |
The sweep was about two-fifths of the loss: 2.5 divided by 6.34 is 39.4%.
Add the $823 million of USDC and at least $200 million at 21:44 to the first sweep, and the total moved through the delegation is at least about $3.523 billion, or 55.6% of the loss. Call it at least about 55%, because later sweeps are mostly unsized. ProtoThema and ForkLog, citing Elliptic, put the reach at about $3.6 billion, and the arithmetic fits: Elliptic's $3.80 billion Ethereum total includes $174 million a second wallet, Binance 16, sent without any delegation.
The rest, at most about 44%, moved by ordinary signed transfers. The first outflows were not even on Ethereum: five Binance wallets on the XRP Ledger sent 233.46 million XRP starting at 20:05, about 16 minutes before the delegation.
EIP-7702 made one drain fast and persistent. It did not make the theft.
Binance and Elliptic both put frozen or seized assets at about $2.85 billion, 45% of the total, leaving about $3.49 billion unfrozen on Binance's basis. Issuers can freeze stablecoins; native assets such as Bitcoin, XRP and ETH cannot be frozen, and Elliptic says the attacker controls around $3.25 billion of that kind. Against Bybit's $1.46 billion in 2025, the loss is 4.3 times larger.
A signing service was the break-in, and Ethereum was not broken
In June 2026 a wallet DevOps engineer installed a tampered Homebrew package while looking for an AI coding tool. Binance rotated credentials, but the attackers had learned who worked on wallet infrastructure.
In September another engineer, approached on a job-hunting platform by someone posing as a "Project Director," went through two interview rounds and was told to download an "assignment" that carried malicious code, which Binance's endpoint tools missed. On Oct. 20 the attacker used that computer and an internal AI tool to reach two more engineers and a token that could deploy containers. On Oct. 29 it ran a malicious script in a container.
Binance's summary: It was not a single isolated breach or a simple phishing incident.
Its first statement had pointed to "a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop."
As for who, Elliptic says the FBI attributed the theft on Oct. 31 to TraderTraitor, the group it also named in the Bybit theft, and TRM agrees "with high confidence." North Korea denies involvement, according to ForkLog and ProtoThema.
Is Ethereum broken? The evidence says no. Dr. Tom Robinson's Elliptic analysis:
"it was the infrastructure and people around the wallets that were compromised, not the cryptography."
Dr. Tom Robinson, Elliptic, blockchain analytics firm
Ethlabs researcher Derek Chiang argued that EIP-7702 is not broken, BeInCrypto reported. Blockaid adds: "A valid signature from a hijacked signing service looks identical to a legitimate one at the chain level."
One caveat: Blockaid, Elliptic and TRM all sell monitoring or screening products, and each published detailed data. Blockaid's chief executive, Ido Ben-Natan, argued in a CTech opinion piece for the pre-signing screening Blockaid sells. The data is useful; the incentive is worth knowing.
What the facts add up to: the exposure is custody design, meaning who can make a signer sign. A tool built for batching became a standing drain only because an attacker already sat inside the signing path.
Customers, and people who hold their own keys
For an exchange customer, the fee is irrelevant; the questions are claim and solvency. Binance says it will "absorb the financial impact of the stolen funds, not our users," and that as of Oct. 31 "98% of the impacted token assets have been replenished." Co-CEO Richard Teng put it in one line: No user bears the loss.
Post by @_RichardTeng
Withdrawals, suspended on Oct. 29, returned in phases from 06:00 UTC on Sunday, Nov. 1. By 15:30 that day, Binance had processed $4.649 billion in withdrawals against $1.01 billion in deposits. The net outflow, about $3.64 billion, is what it called 2.1% of its $171 billion in assets under management. Binance did not say why customers withdrew.
Outside voices urge caution. Coin Bureau says a reserve proof does not "establish continuous solvency, coverage of every liability or immediate withdrawal availability." Iwa Salami, a law professor at the University of East London, writes that investors "should not assume that crypto holdings enjoy the deposit insurance or central bank safety nets available with some traditional banking activities." Those are outside views, not instructions.
For people who hold their own keys, the risk differs. Security Alliance guidance names phishing: someone who "tricks a user into signing a message that sets the wallet's code to a malicious contract" can "gain full control and drain all assets."
A delegation looks like a pointer in an account's code, "0xef0100 || address," while an ordinary wallet has no code. Block explorers and some wallets can typically show whether an address has code. The guidance says you can revoke one by authorizing a transaction that sets the delegation address to the zero address. Like any transaction, that costs a fee. Swapping keys alone does not clear it.
A real wallet prompts a switch only inside its own app, and Any request to do so via email, a website, or a direct message is a phishing scam,
says the Security Alliance's EIP-7702 guidance. For the sweep hour by hour, Blockaid's minute-by-minute timeline is the best primary account.
Binance calls the investigation ongoing, calls its report initial, says its findings face further independent review without giving a date, and says some details will stay confidential. And the one number everyone repeated is the only one that none of those four documents contains.
