Tether, Circle and Ripple freeze over $2.5B tied to Binance hack
Tether froze over 1.567B USDT and Circle over 800M USDC linked to the $6.3B Binance hack, while Ripple locked about $200M. How the stablecoin freezes work.
STABLECOINS & CBDCSECURITY & HACKSNEWS
Hana Kimura
10/30/20262 min read
Stablecoin issuers Tether and Circle have frozen more than $2.3 billion in tokens linked to the Oct. 29 Binance hack, and Ripple has reportedly locked about $200 million more, as issuers moved within hours to stop the attacker from cashing out.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on X that the company had frozen more than 1.567 billion USDT connected to the incident. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao had earlier cited a figure of about $971 million, according to FinanceFeeds, so the total grew as more attacker addresses were identified. Decrypt reported that 975.1 million USDT was blocked in the main receiving address alone.
Circle followed with a freeze of more than 800 million USDC. CEO Jeremy Allaire wrote that the action was taken in coordination with law enforcement. Decrypt timed the Circle freeze at 21:04 UTC, about 40 minutes after the first large Ethereum transfer left a Binance hot wallet at 20:24 UTC. Binance co-CEO Yi He separately thanked Ripple for freezing roughly $200 million, without naming the asset or the addresses involved.
Why the freezes matter
USDT and USDC contracts let issuers blacklist addresses, which leaves the tokens in place but makes them impossible to move. Arkham data cited by CoinDesk showed the attacker's wallets at one point held about $1.5 billion in USDT and more than $800 million in USDC, out of more than $5.7 billion in total assets. In a late Thursday update, Binance said around $3 billion in assets had been frozen, including $2.3 billion in USDT and USDC.
The freezes still cover less than half of the loot. Ether and bitcoin taken in the attack cannot be blocked by an issuer, and the attacker has been routing funds through Uniswap. CoinDesk also reported that the attacker borrowed at least 20,000 WETH, about $44 million, on Aave against stolen USDT, a common way to swap freezable stablecoins for assets nobody can block.
Frozen tokens are not automatically returned to Binance, and no recovery timetable has been given. Binance puts total losses at about $6.3 billion and says customers will be covered from its SAFU fund and company money. TRM Labs attributes the attack with high confidence to North Korea's TraderTraitor group.
Source: CoinDesk, Decrypt, FinanceFeeds, Arkham