Half of the Funds Stolen From Binance Are Frozen: Tether and Circle Stopped About 2.4 Billion Dollars

Half of the Funds Stolen From Binance Are Frozen: Tether and Circle Stopped About 2.4 Billion Dollars

Of the roughly 6.3 billion dollars stolen from Binance on October 29, about 3 billion is already frozen. Industry partners helped: stablecoin issuers and analytics firms.

This means the real damage from the biggest hack of the year is almost half the headline figure. And it took only a matter of days.

Who froze how much

Tether and Circle together account for about 2.4 billion. The rest was stopped with the help of other industry partners.

In our view, this is a strong signal to the market. Issuers and analytics firms worked as a single system, and the attackers lost almost half of their haul.

What could not be frozen

About 3.3 billion dollars remained in assets that cannot be frozen. Among them are 18,270 BTC on 19 addresses, roughly 960 BTC per address on average.

At the time of the reports, these bitcoins had not moved to exchanges. At around 77,500 dollars, where BTC ended October, that is roughly 1.4 billion.

From what we see, after major hacks exchanges quickly add such addresses to their blocklists.

Binance will cover the losses

Binance promised to cover all losses from set-aside reserves exceeding 6.3 billion dollars. For the exchange's clients, this is the main news of the week.

How freezable assets differ from non-freezable ones

USDT and USDC are issued by companies. The smart contracts of these coins include an address-blocking function, and the issuer can stop tokens in a specific wallet.

Bitcoin works differently. It has no central issuer, so no one can block coins directly on the network, only in an exchange or custodian account.

What this means for choosing a settlement coin

For an arbitrage trader, freezing has two sides: it recovers stolen funds, but it can also hit someone who receives coins from a flagged address.

• stablecoins are convenient for settling between exchanges, but they can be blocked at the address level
• bitcoin cannot be frozen on the network, but its price changes while the transfer is in progress
• in P2P deals it makes sense to check where the coins came from, especially in the days after major hacks
• it is safer to keep capital in several stablecoins and on several exchanges

We believe the Binance story, if anything, adds to the trust in stablecoins as a settlement coin. The freeze risk for an honest trader is small.

Our tools

In the days after a major hack, prices and spreads across exchanges diverge unevenly, and this is easier to track when every venue is visible at once. Our arbitrage screener keeps dozens of venues in one window, refreshes quotes every second and shows each gap together with the volume actually behind it. The spread calculator helps you check what survives fees, network costs and slippage at your size. The bot is fully manual. It never connects to your exchange API keys.

To test the tools on a live market, ArbitrageScanner offers one day of free access to the whole ecosystem.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)

1. How much was stolen from Binance on October 29, 2026?

About 6.3 billion dollars, and roughly 3 billion of it is already frozen.

2. Who froze funds after the Binance hack?

Tether froze about 1.6 billion dollars in USDT, and Circle about 800 million in USDC. Elliptic confirmed 2.8 billion frozen.

3. Why can't stolen bitcoins be frozen?

Bitcoin has no issuer that could block an address on the network. About 3.3 billion dollars remained in such assets.

4. Will Binance return users' money?

Binance promised to cover all losses from set-aside reserves exceeding 6.3 billion dollars.

Conclusion

About half of the 6.3 billion dollars stolen from Binance is already frozen: Tether stopped about 1.6 billion in USDT, and Circle about 800 million in USDC. Binance promises to cover losses from its reserves.

For an arbitrage trader, the takeaway is practical. Stablecoins are convenient for settlement, but they can be blocked, so it is better to split capital across coins and exchanges and not to accept tokens from questionable sources.

IMPORTANT! We are software developers. We do not give recommendations or promises of earnings and we do not advise you to invest your money anywhere. Our software is fully manual, all your money stays under your own control. We show examples of how our clients have earned on arbitrage in the past, but we do not advise repeating those actions one to one. Your earnings depend solely on your own actions and on market factors.