Binance Says Hack Refill Is Complete, but Users Still Can't Verify It

Binance says the cleanup is done. The exchange announced on Nov. 12 that it has finished covering every asset hit in its Oct. 29 hack, posting on X that it had “completed coverage of assets impacted in the security incident” and published a fresh Proof of Reserves snapshot. Co-founder Yi He reshared the statement with a single word: “100%.”

What customers can't do yet is check that for themselves. Binance said users will be able to confirm their assets are backed “at a minimum of 1:1” only “once the zero-knowledge proof is generated” — a cryptographic check that would let each person verify their balance is counted in the reserve total without exposing anyone else's data. The Nov. 12 post gave no timeline for that proof.

As Unchained viewed the Proof of Reserves page on Nov. 13, Binance listed reserve ratios of 100.05% for bitcoin, 100.02% for ether and 104.34% for USDT, Tether's dollar-pegged stablecoin. That USDT figure works out to an onchain wallet balance roughly 1.06 billion tokens above customers' net account balances, by Unchained's calculation from the page's own numbers — and the onchain total includes about 306.7 million USDT parked with third-party custodians.

The hack itself, on Oct. 29, involved digital assets Binance valued at about $6.34 billion. Binance's incident report said roughly $2.85 billion of the stolen assets had been frozen or intercepted, a number the exchange flagged as subject to verification.

Binance's Nov. 2 recovery update had already said that for the 10 tokens in its Oct. 31 snapshot, “the affected assets were replenished using Binance's own funds,” with a follow-up putting coverage at about 95% of the impacted amount and Binance pledging to absorb the loss rather than hand it to users. That post shipped with the zero-knowledge proof for the Oct. 31 snapshot, and Binance estimated at the time that the proof for its next snapshot, then set for Nov. 4, would take about 40 to 50 hours.