Binance's $10.7B bill for fines and hacks could swallow half its profits

Binance's tab for fines and hacks has reached around $10.7 billion — and by one analyst's math, that's more than half of what the exchange earned before taxes from 2021 through 2025. Vetle Lunde, head of research at K33 Research, put Binance's pre-tax profits for those years at $19.2 billion in a back-of-the-envelope estimate. If he's right, the penalties and theft losses eat up about 56% of it. "Being the leading casino is unimaginably profitable," Lunde wrote on X, adding that it's "quite wild" that the damage partly just reflects a cost of doing business.

The single biggest line item is October's theft, the largest in crypto history. Binance set aside $6.34 billion to cover it and says it has already made whole roughly 95% of affected assets, with withdrawals back to normal after an initial rush. The exchange also drained half its SAFU emergency fund — 7,500 BTC — to absorb around 9% of the losses. There's a silver lining: about $3 billion of the stolen crypto has been frozen, so the final bill may shrink depending on what gets recovered and when.

The fines side is more transparent. Binance agreed to a $4.32 billion U.S. criminal settlement in 2023, a deal that pushed co-founder Changpeng Zhao out of the CEO seat and later landed him in a U.S. prison for a few months. Bitcoin.com News tallied roughly $20 million more in penalties from Binance's units abroad, ranging from a $6.9 million hit in Australia this year to a $750,000 fine in Turkey in 2021 — bringing known fines to about $4.34 billion. Add the 2019 hack, when 7,000 BTC worth around $41 million vanished and SAFU covered it, and hack-related losses total roughly $6.38 billion.

Hard numbers on Binance's actual business are scarce. In nine years, the company has never published consolidated financial statements covering the whole group, though the DOJ noted that U.S. users alone generated more than $1.6 billion in profit for the exchange between August 2017 and October 2022. A glimpse comes from Bifinity, its Lithuanian fiat-to-crypto payments provider, which CZ owned directly from April 2023 until January 2025. Public records show it pulled in nearly €1.5 billion ($1.68 billion) in revenue and earned almost €180 million ($202 million) in net profit after paying €110.8 million ($124 million) in taxes.

The fallout is already visible on the balance sheet. Binance's tracked assets have dropped by more than 11% since the Oct. 29 hack, now sitting around $128.3 billion, a slide that reflects both the stolen funds and softer crypto prices. That's an awkward moment to be rebuilding, with Coinbase, Kraken and OKX investing hard in expansion and the market looking closer to a bear phase than a confirmed bull run. The exchange says it's still hunting the remaining stolen funds and hasn't said whether it will publish financial statements.