CZ Wants a Crypto Security Alliance. Binance Just Buried Its Last One

Paragraph 1: The T3 Financial Crime Unit — a partnership between Tether, Tron, TRM Labs and Binance — quietly shut down in late August, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. That's months before the $6.3 billion hack that hammered Binance on Oct. 29. Tron, Tether and TRM Labs all confirmed the closure to Bloomberg. Binance, which only joined the unit in September 2025, declined to comment.

Paragraph 2: The unit didn't fall apart over one dramatic blowup. Per Bloomberg's sources, it had been struggling for a year with slow response times and a lack of coordination among its members. Its account on X, which had built up more than 1,400 followers, is gone too — though users kept tagging it into late August.

Paragraph 3: T3 had a real scoreboard while it lasted. In May 2026 the unit said it had frozen more than $450 million in illicit tether (USDT) since launching in September 2024, and claimed it intercepted 43.9% more dirty proceeds in 2025 than in 2024 while working with law enforcement across 23 jurisdictions. When Binance signed on, Nils Andersen-Röed, then global head of the exchange's Financial Intelligence Unit, framed the move as proof of its dedication to real-time collaboration with partners and police.

Paragraph 4: The timing stings. After the record Oct. 29 hack, Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) called for a crypto-wide security alliance — one that could spot common attack methods before they spread, share audit findings, swap lessons from breaches and coordinate faster asset freezes. Freezing illicit assets was exactly what T3 was built to do.

Paragraph 5: The pieces are scattering in different directions. Tron teased an unspecified 'new initiative' coming soon, while Tether said it will keep fighting crime alongside TRM Labs, which launched its Beacon Network intelligence-sharing system back in 2025. Tether also said it froze more than $1.5 billion in USDT stolen from Binance after the hack. Whether CZ's proposed alliance fares better than the last one is an open question.