Binance Hack Becomes Largest Crypto Theft Ever, Dwarfing Bybit’s $1.4 Billion

With losses now estimated between $5.9 billion and $6.3 billion, Thursday’s Binance security incident has surpassed every previous crypto exchange hack on record, more than quadrupling the roughly $1.4 billion lost in Bybit’s February 2025 breach, which itself had held the record for barely a year and a half.

How the numbers stack up

Bybit’s hack, which primarily targeted its Ethereum cold wallet by exploiting multi-signature security protocols, was previously the largest single crypto exchange theft on record at roughly $1.4 to $1.5 billion. Before that, the Ronin Network bridge hack in 2022 at $615 million and the Poly Network hack in 2021 at $613 million had stood among the largest DeFi-specific incidents. Binance’s own 2022 BNB Bridge exploit, by comparison, cost roughly $570 million, a figure that is now dwarfed by what the attacker has already moved into just two wallets from this week’s incident alone.

A different kind of record than Mt. Gox

The 2011 Mt. Gox collapse, which involved roughly 647,000 bitcoin disappearing, remains a distinct historical case because the exchange itself failed and shut down entirely, whereas Bybit secured bridge loans covering 80% of its loss and kept withdrawals running throughout, and Binance has likewise pledged to keep operating while covering losses through its SAFU fund and company reserves.

What history suggests happens next

After Bybit’s hack, the exchange temporarily fell from the second-largest to the eleventh-largest exchange by some rankings, while Binance itself saw a reported $3.9 billion in net inflows in the week following, as traders moved funds toward exchanges perceived as more stable. Whether Binance, as the exchange at the center of this week’s incident, experiences a similar outflow to competitors in the coming days is one of the more consequential open questions for the broader exchange market.

See our full roadmap of major hacks in our historical crypto volatility guide for more context on how markets have absorbed past incidents of this scale.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Historical loss figures vary slightly across sources and are presented here as commonly reported ranges.