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🐳 Daily Edition: North Korea Carries Out Largest Heist in History

🐳 Daily Edition: North Korea Carries Out Largest Heist in History

NK-affiliated hacker groups are now responsible for 85% of hacked crypto value YTD, representing about 45% of the country's GDP

Beluga & Will McKinnon
November 02, 2026

On October 29th, a North Korean hacker group known as TraderTraitor engineered the largest theft of all time across any industry: a total of $6.3 billion was drained from Binance’s hot wallets redirecting deposit sweeps to an address the attackers controlled. Stablecoin providers Tether and Circle were able to freeze almost $3 billion of the stolen funds within an hour of the incident, but the remainder of the funds sit in unfreezable assets. Given this was carried out by TraderTraitor, recovery of the rest of the assets is very unlikely.

North Korea is now denying their involvement likely due to the attention the case has drawn from the FBI and White House, but if you’ve been in crypto for long enough you know cases of this magnitude are usually them. In fact, counting this last Binance hack, TRM Labs estimates North Korea has been responsible for 85% of all value hacked in crypto YTD, with total losses reaching $8.7B this year alone.

Interestingly, looking at the prices of majors you wouldn’t know this hack had just occurred: Bitcoin and ETH are actually holding up better than some of the biggest stocks in the S&P500 (INTC -35%, RDDT -30% since Thursday). In isolation this admittedly doesn’t mean much, but it’s an interesting data point as to where we are in the grand crypto price cycle.