FBI Ties $6.3B Binance Hack to North Korea's TraderTraitor

The FBI pinned the $6.3 billion Binance theft on North Korea. On Oct. 31 the bureau confirmed TraderTraitor was behind the Oct. 30 hack, backing up blockchain analytics firms TRM, Chainalysis and onchain sleuth ZachXBT, who had already made the call. Investigators published more than 600 Ethereum addresses, just under 20 Bitcoin addresses and a single Solana address tied to the attackers. THORNode and RPC operators, instant exchanges, DeFi services and analytics firms were told to block transactions touching them. Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin said the crew had already burned through thousands of addresses and expects tens of thousands more.

Markets took the punch fast. Bitcoin bottomed at $77,138 on Oct. 30, well off an Oct. 27 high near $81,000, and ended the stretch around $78,058 on Nov. 1, with $77,000 holding as support even as institutional money rushed for the exits. Crypto liquidations hit $1.57 billion, the heaviest single-day flush of the period. DeFi TVL dropped 5.65% on Oct. 30 alone to $83.5B, down from $88.7B, before limping back to $85.25B by Nov. 1.

Stablecoins wobbled too. The total market cap slipped to $296.16B by Nov. 1, down from $300.36B — a 1.38% weekly decline — with USDT at $179.67B and USDC at $71.86B. Issuers froze more than $2.4 billion of the stolen funds. Binance arranged $6.34 billion to cover losses and said that by Oct. 31 it had replaced 90% of the stolen crypto, with phased withdrawal restarts beginning Nov. 1.

There was at least one headline nobody had to grimace through. The OCC approved Ripple National Trust Bank, a milestone CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced Oct. 27. In the same week, Franklin Templeton dropped $150 million in fund shares into a single XRP Ledger wallet, RLUSD expanded to Robinhood Chain and Bitstamp, and XRP Ledger developers floated wallets that need zero XRP to handle stablecoin payments.

Wall Street's tokenization train kept moving. DTCC's tokenization service went live Oct. 28 on the Canton Network and its private Besu blockchain, spanning roughly $30 trillion in market value across 34 eligible securities — Russell 1000 stocks, ETFs and U.S. Treasuries. Twenty firms signed on, including JPMorgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and UBS. Citi analysts project tokenized securities reaching $5.5 trillion. The rival OKX-ICE tokenized stock plan, by contrast, drew objections from JPMorgan, Coca-Cola, Dell, Wells Fargo, Cisco, Marvell, Walmart and Eli Lilly.

Elsewhere, ICE moved toward bringing Hyperliquid perpetual futures to the U.S. through a planned 24/7 venue pending CFTC approval, and is investing in Trade[XYZ]. RWA active AUM tracked by DeFi Llama slid, hitting $29.98B by Nov. 1 from $30.88B on Oct. 27, with Stellar adding $425.3M over 30 days while Ethereum shed $1.6B and ZKsync Era lost $328.2M. The SEC charged two entities over a $130 million fraud built on bogus filings, and South Korea weighed a fourth delay to its crypto gains tax, potentially pushing it to 2029.