News/Market news

Five Days Locked Out: What the Biggest Crypto Theft on Record Means for Memecoin Holders

A reported $6.3 billion exchange theft froze withdrawals for coins like SHIB and BONK. What happened, what is unknown, and what holders can check.

November 4, 2026By the CTO teamFacts as of November 3, 2026

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For about five days, people who held memecoins on one major exchange could not take them out.

The exchange is Binance. On Thursday, October 29, 2026, it was hit by a theft that Binance itself puts at about $6.3 billion. NBC News reported that Binance believes it is the largest crypto theft ever recorded. On November 1, with bitcoin already restored, 531 of the exchange's 552 listed coins were still suspended for withdrawal, according to Memeburn's report on the reopening. Shiba Inu, Bonk, dogwifhat, Pengu, the official Trump token and Pump.fun's PUMP token came back only on November 3.

This is a story about money that is large enough to be hard to picture. It is also a story about a small, practical question that every memecoin holder can answer for themselves: where do my tokens actually sit, and who holds the keys?

What happened, in order

All times and amounts below come from the reports linked in the sources list. Where they disagree, we say so.

October 29. TRM Labs, a blockchain-analysis firm, reconstructed the timeline in UTC. Between 20:05 and 20:09, five Binance XRP wallets sent out 233.46 million XRP. Soon after, wallets on Solana and Optimism were drained. At 20:20 a Binance bitcoin hot wallet sent out 18,270 BTC. A second wave hit Avalanche and Polygon wallets at 23:05. TRM counts about $6.36 billion moved across ten blockchains. Chainalysis, another analysis firm, puts the unauthorized transfers at about $6.4 billion. Binance's own figure is "about $6.3 billion," which it calls an "estimated total impact" that may rise as tracing and freezing continue.

TRM says the attacker prepared for at least 36 hours before the theft, funding an operator wallet through the Tornado Cash mixing service from the morning of October 28, and rehearsing the code before installing it on a Binance hot wallet.

The same day, TechCrunch reported that Binance confirmed it was dealing with a security incident and had halted withdrawals across multiple networks. Binance said at the time: "Rest assured that user funds are completely safe." Binance founder Changpeng Zhao wrote on X that the company had likely been hacked and said he expected user funds to be "fully covered."

NBC News reported that Bitcoin fell about 4.3% and Ethereum about 4.6% as the news spread. NBC also reported that Binance says the attack began with a compromised laptop, which let an attacker reach a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawals. TRM's own assessment, as of its October 30 report, is that the attacker compromised Binance's hot wallet signing infrastructure, and it noted that Binance had not yet published a root cause. These two descriptions are not necessarily in conflict, but they are not identical, and the full technical account has not been published as far as we could find.

Who did it. TRM Labs attributes the theft to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking unit, and writes that it makes this judgment "with high confidence." Chainalysis also attributes it to TraderTraitor. Those are the conclusions of two private analysis firms. We have not read a government statement ourselves, so we attribute the claim to the firms that made it.

The freeze. Stablecoin issuers moved fast. Tether's CEO said it froze more than $1.567 billion of its digital currency, according to NBC. TRM counted about $2.7 billion frozen by 00:30 UTC on October 30. Chainalysis said about $2.8 billion had been frozen as of 11:30 a.m. ET on November 3. These totals differ mainly because they were taken at different times, and Chainalysis expects the stolen funds to keep moving.

The cover. According to crypto.news, Binance says it had replaced about 80% of the affected assets by October 30, about 90% by October 31 and about 95% by November 1. It says the remaining 5% is made up of less liquid coins that take longer to buy in the needed amounts, and that it will cover those losses without passing them to customers. It reports funding the replacement from its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU), its Futures Insurance Fund and corporate treasury, and has pledged to restore SAFU to about $1 billion.

The reopening. Withdrawals returned in phases. On November 1, bitcoin and 15 networks were restored first. On November 3 at 04:00 UTC, a further phase restored 51 assets, 31 on Ethereum and 20 on Solana, each released as it passed security checks. That phase included SHIB, BONK, WIF, PENGU, TRUMP and PUMP. Several networks, including BNB Smart Chain, XRP Ledger, Sui and Base, were still pending, with no completion time announced. The next proof-of-reserves snapshot was scheduled for November 4.

Where the memecoin market stood

The theft landed in a memecoin market that was already quiet. The numbers we could confirm are small and mixed.

CoinGecko data cited by CryptoTicker on the morning of November 3 put SHIB at $0.00000457, about 7.9% below its October 28 close of $0.00000496, down 5.5% over seven days and 20.1% over thirty days. Its 24-hour volume was $42.8 million and its market cap was $2.69 billion. CryptoTicker's view is that the reopening is an operational event, not a price driver. The same article cites U.Today data showing about 85.8 trillion SHIB on exchanges, roughly a seventh of the 589 trillion in circulation.

On November 3, FXStreet reported PEPE up 4.55%, DOGE up 1.66% and SHIB up 1.53% on the day, while 1000CAT fell 7.17% to 0.001593 USDT after what FXStreet called profit-taking following a 50% rise the day before. FXStreet's author gives no named price feed for those figures, so we use them as color, not as a measurement.

Earlier, on October 30, Crypto Economy described PEPE as rebounding about 15% in a Friday snapshot "after heavy selling pressure linked to stolen tokens from the Binance incident," while DOGE and SHIB were each down a few percent. The article does not date the snapshot precisely and later shows all three up, so we treat it as one passing reading and draw no conclusion from it.

The honest summary is that the theft did not produce a single clean memecoin crash. What it produced was five days in which holders at one venue could not move some tokens, even if they wanted to.

It was not the first one this fall

On September 24, Bitget lost more than $387 million to attackers who, according to its CEO Gracy Chen, tricked an internal approval system into authorizing transfers without stealing private keys. Fortune reported that Chen suspects North Korean attackers, and that this was Bitget's suspicion, not a confirmed finding in the article. Fortune also noted that Bitget Wallet, a separate self-custody product, was not affected. Chainalysis says funds from the Binance theft commingled on-chain with funds from the Bitget theft, which it also attributes to North Korean actors.

Before that, the largest on record was the Bybit theft of about $1.5 billion in February 2025, per NBC. TRM calls the Binance incident roughly four times larger. In the same Fortune article, Chainalysis is cited for a record $2 billion stolen by North Korean-linked hackers in 2025.

A balance is a claim

NBC News made a point that matters more than the headline number: funds held at exchanges are not automatically insured, so refunds are at each exchange's discretion. In this case Binance has said it will cover the losses, and by its account it has already replaced most of what was taken. That is good news for its customers. It is also a choice the company made, not a guarantee a customer could have counted on in advance.

That is the plain meaning of leaving tokens on an exchange. What you see on the screen is a balance, a promise by the company that it owes you that amount. The token itself, the thing recorded on the blockchain, is held by wallets the company controls. When those wallets are compromised, your balance may still be honored, but your ability to act on it, to sell, to move, to send, depends on when the company chooses to reopen the doors. Between October 29 and November 3, that was the situation.

Be careful about the opposite conclusion, too. Holding your own keys removes the exchange as a middleman, but it moves the whole job onto you. A lost recovery phrase has no support line. A fake wallet app or a fake link can empty an account as surely as a hot wallet breach. The Bitget case is a useful reminder that even the exchange's own self-custody product was a separate system from the one that was hit. Neither choice is free of risk. The point is to know which risk you are taking.

Why this matters for a community-run coin

A community takeover is a different kind of arrangement, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not change.

It does not protect anyone from a hack at a company that holds their tokens. A coin run by its community can be sitting on an exchange as easily as any other.

What it changes is who decides what happens next with a project. When a creator leaves, the token keeps existing, because it lives on a public blockchain contract, but the website, the announcements and the answers to questions stop. A takeover is people choosing to do that work in the open. On FOMOEgg's side, the CTO team's published proof page records that the takeover request was approved on September 25, 2026 and the on-chain transition completed on October 14, 2026, on Robinhood Chain. You are meant to check that page, not take our word for it.

The link to this week's news is the same discipline applied to two different questions. With a community coin, you ask: who is actually in charge, and can I see the evidence? With an exchange balance, you ask: who actually holds my tokens, and what happens if they are unreachable for five days? Both are questions about control, and both have answers you can look up before you need them.

Three questions before the next headline

Where are my tokens right now? Open your account. Is it an exchange balance, or a wallet you control? Write down which, for each token you hold.
What is my plan if the venue is unreachable for five days? If the answer is "I would be stuck," you have found a risk you can size on purpose.
Which claim can I check myself? A screenshot, a post and a headline are claims. A public contract, a dated record and a block explorer are things you can look at. This article is a pile of claims too, which is why every number in it has a dated link below.

None of this is a prediction about any price. It is a way to read news like this week's without needing to guess.

Where to practice

If you want to practice that kind of checking on something small, FOMOEgg's free lessons, called Eggducation, walk through basic token checks in plain language, including how to read a burn on the public record. The takeover proof page is there too. Read it first, ask hard questions, and bring the skeptics. Start at fomoegg.com.

Not financial advice. Memecoins can lose all their value.

Sources

All pages were fetched and read on November 3, 2026.