President Trump said Friday that his administration is investigating the $6.3 billion hack of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, the largest such breach ever recorded, but he declined to pin the attack on North Korea.
Asked in the Oval Office whether a suspected North Korean hacker collective was responsible, Trump replied, “We don’t know,” adding, “We’re looking at that.”
Blockchain intelligence firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis have attributed the Binance breach to TraderTraitor, a cybercrime outfit tied to North Korea. The group has been linked to a string of high-profile crypto thefts, and analysts say the Binance operation bears the hallmarks of its previous campaigns, including last year’s $1.5 billion raid on Bybit.
The stolen funds began leaving Binance wallets Thursday afternoon, prompting the exchange to halt all deposits and withdrawals. In response, crypto companies froze roughly $3 billion in assets connected to the hack. According to TRM Labs, the attacker moved money across multiple blockchain networks—including XRP Ledger, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, and Solana—with much of the activity compressed into a 20-minute window.
Trump, who has long expressed skepticism about digital currencies, called the incident simply “a hack” and used it to reiterate his wariness of crypto. “That’s the problem,” he said. “You know the old-fashioned way when you used to sign a check … these are different people, never see the money anymore. So I’ve always felt it was a little bit dangerous.”
He added that Binance officials claim to have the situation “pretty much under control,” but cautioned, “We’ll see.”
Binance has pledged to cover all losses from the breach. In a video posted to X, co-CEO Richard Teng thanked partners who moved quickly to freeze assets and praised global law enforcement for working “hand-in-hand to seek justice.”
“Difficult times like this are a great reminder of how strong our industry is when we work together,” Teng said, also expressing gratitude to users for their “patience and understanding” and vowing that the company is “working nonstop to resolve this, to make the users whole and live up to their trust.”
The scale of the heist has intensified scrutiny on crypto security and the growing threat posed by state-linked cyber actors. As investigators dig into the Binance hack, the episode is likely to fuel debates over how digital assets are safeguarded and whether existing regulations are adequate to counter increasingly sophisticated attacks.
Julia Shapero contributed to this report.
