Circle Freezes Roughly $1.1B in USDC After Binance Hack

Circle has locked down roughly $1.1 billion in USDC linked to the Binance hack, saying the freeze went down in coordination with law enforcement. Dante Disparte, Circle's chief strategy officer and head of global policy and operations, put the number in a blog post Thursday and said the company is still working with partners to pin down which funds were hit.

Here's how it works: when law enforcement lands a valid court order for a USDC wallet address, Circle freezes that address, shutting off the stablecoin moving in or out. Disparte drew a firm line on what Circle does and doesn't do. The company doesn't decide who owns the assets, whether USDC should be frozen or headed for forfeiture, or whether a crime even happened — those calls sit with law enforcement and the courts.

Disparte pitched the freeze as proof that activity on open blockchains can be analyzed and, in many cases, traced by investigators. That traceability, he said, lets exchanges, stablecoin issuers, analytics firms, custodians and investigators work the same trail together.

He wants that coordination to get faster. Disparte urged law enforcement agencies to go deeper on real-time sharing around digital asset incidents, and pushed regulators to write clear frameworks so firms can move quickly on credible threats without trampling due process. A legal safe harbor, harmonized threat information sharing and clearly bounded legal steps for freezing and seizing crypto, he argued, can keep systems open, market participants safe and bad actors on the run.

The broader lesson, per Disparte: cybersecurity and incident response are shared responsibilities now, and no single organization can see the entire threat landscape on its own. This freeze isn't Circle's first swing at the Binance fallout — CoinMarketCap reported the company had frozen more than 800 million USDC by Oct. 30, alongside freezes by Tether, Ripple and others. Binance, meanwhile, is bringing withdrawals back in phases.