US Gets Court Approval to Seize $1.2 Billion Stolen in the Binance Hack

The US Justice Department has received court approval to seize or freeze more than $1.2 billion of the cryptocurrency stolen from Binance on October 29. Across all efforts, more than $2.7 billion of the stolen funds has now been frozen.

Why it matters

The Binance hack, estimated at $6.3 billion, is one of the largest thefts in crypto history. Seizing stolen money is rare and slow, so getting more than $2.7 billion frozen in two weeks is a big result.

For Binance users, the exchange says the question of losses is closed. Binance announced that it has fully restored the assets affected by the breach. It also published a new proof of reserves: a snapshot of its holdings that lets users check, with a privacy-preserving cryptographic proof, that their balances are backed at least one to one.

Who is behind it

According to the Justice Department, the attack was carried out by TraderTraitor, a hacking group linked to North Korea. The hackers keep laundering the money through cross-chain bridges, mixers and exchanges. Law enforcement and crypto companies are tracking the funds and blocking them where they can. The department also said it had taken down cloud infrastructure the North Korean hackers were using.

The launderers are inventive. Earlier this week the hackers swapped 35 million XRP for bitcoin through THORChain, a cross-chain exchange. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic found at least six meme tokens on the NEAR network, created between November 5 and 7, that the hackers set up themselves. Each had its own trading pool and almost no outside trading. Only about $430,000 has moved this way so far. Elliptic first documented the trick in February 2025, after the Bybit hack.

What's next

The seized funds go through US forfeiture proceedings before any money can be returned. No timeline has been announced.