Binance Breach Drains $6.3B; Stablecoin Issuers Freeze About $3B in Hours

On October 29, 2026, roughly $6.3 billion was pulled from Binance's hot wallets across several blockchains, much of it within twenty minutes. According to Binance's incident update and on-chain analysis by TRM Labs, the attack did not stem from a leaked private key, with an early finding pointing to a compromised DevOps engineer laptop that gave access to a container able to submit unauthorized withdrawals. The attacker reportedly exploited Ethereum's EIP-7702 to get a Binance-labeled hot wallet to sign delegation authorizations disguised as routine digests, enabling the transfer of 167,464 ETH and over 1.6 billion USDT. Stablecoin issuers Tether, Circle, Ripple, and others then froze about $3 billion within hours, with the outcome depending largely on how quickly they acted before funds were dispersed. The incident highlights the admin controls embedded in stablecoin contracts that allow issuers to blacklist addresses.