The 18,270 bitcoin that vanished from Binance on October 29 add up to more than Tesla’s entire holdings, more than double El Salvador’s national reserve, and roughly three times what North Korea earned from a full year of exports. That last comparison is why “bitcoin” climbed into Korea’s top Google searches this weekend: on Saturday the FBI said the thieves were North Korean.
What happened
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, lost about $6.3 billion in bitcoin, ether and other digital assets within minutes on Thursday, October 29. It is the largest crypto theft on record, dwarfing the $1.5 billion taken from rival exchange Bybit in February 2025.
The bitcoin portion alone is worth about $1.4 billion at roughly $78,500 a coin, or around 1.87 trillion won. Alongside it went a large pile of ether and stablecoins; blockchain data firm Bitquery counted 525,201 ether in the attackers’ wallets as of October 31.
On October 31 the FBI attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking unit it also blamed for the Bybit theft. The bureau said the group was converting the stolen assets mainly into ether and would likely try to launder them through decentralized finance platforms and instant-swap services. Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs had already pointed at the same North Korean group. Binance itself has not named the attacker.
Why Koreans are doing the math
The comparisons that went viral in Korea are about scale. Tesla held 11,509 bitcoin as of September 30, according to its quarterly filing; the thieves now hold 59% more. El Salvador’s government reserve is about 7,820 BTC. Coinbase held 18,071 BTC for investment and operations at the end of September, which the thieves also edged past. Only SpaceX, at 18,712 BTC, still sits ahead of them, and not by much.
Then there is the export figure. KOTRA, South Korea’s state trade promotion agency, put North Korea’s total commodity exports last year at $468.59 million. The stolen bitcoin alone is about three times that, and the full $6.36 billion haul equals roughly 22% of North Korea’s 2025 GDP. For a country under heavy UN sanctions, a single Thursday afternoon of hacking outperformed its entire legitimate trade economy many times over.
The money is not a side hustle. A 2024 UN sanctions monitoring report said malicious cyber activity accounted for roughly half of North Korea’s foreign currency income, and Chainalysis estimates Pyongyang’s hackers stole $2.02 billion in crypto in 2025, up 51% from the year before. In 2026 so far, North Korea-linked attacks account for nearly 89% of all crypto-heist losses worldwide, with the average take per attack rising from $50.65 million in 2021 to $185.65 million this year. Analysts say the proceeds help fund nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
What happens next
Binance said on Saturday it had set aside enough of its own funds to cover 90% of the missing assets and promised customers would be fully reimbursed. About $3 billion of the stolen assets had been frozen on-chain, though frozen is not the same as recovered. Withdrawals, suspended since the attack, were slated to return by Sunday. Ari Redbord of TRM Labs expects the hackers to split the funds and launder them through smaller exchanges over months, but says the money can still be traced in real time. Catching it is the harder part.
In Seoul, the heist landed on an already nervous financial sector. Korean regulators recently alerted banks, brokerages and crypto exchanges after about 4.4 million scanning attempts from North Korea-assigned IP addresses beginning October 21, and the Science Ministry and Korea Internet & Security Agency have a 24-hour emergency response system running. South Korea, the US and Japan held their fifth trilateral working-group meeting on North Korean cyber threats in Washington in June, and the National Assembly is still drafting a Digital Asset Basic Act to regulate the sector. As Bloomberg Economics analyst Adam Farrar put it, “The Binance hack will certainly not be the last.”
Sources
- AP via ABC News — FBI blames North Korea for stolen billions from Binance in biggest hack in history
- The Korea Daily — North Korean hackers’ stolen bitcoin holdings surpass Tesla
- The Korea Herald — North Korea’s cyber terrorism gains renewed scrutiny following record Binance crypto heist
- The Korea Times — North Korea has every incentive to keep stealing crypto, analysts say