Key Takeaways
- Binance CEO Yi He said Ripple froze about $200 million tied to the Binance hack, on top of $2B+ in USDT and USDC.
- World Liberty Financial and Bitgo froze $27 million in USD1 and 48 million WLFI on Oct. 29.
- Analysts puts total freezes near $2.7 billion, with about $2.4 billion still beyond issuers’ reach.
Ripple Steps in
Binance’s ongoing crisis has turned into an unusual show of cooperation amongst some of the biggest names in crypto. Most recently, Binance co-CEO Yi noted:
“Thanks to the Ripple team for promptly freezing approximately 200 million. User Funds are SAFU.”
The freeze was presumably in RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin, but the provision wasn’t entirely airtight. Media outlets reported that the attacker had swapped 36 million RLUSD for 15,439 ETH before the freezes took full effect, while 52.54 million RLUSD remained unfrozen at the holding wallet at the time of its report. Ripple’s Jack McDonald said the company was “closely monitoring reports of a potential exploit involving Binance.”
Early tallies of the drain varied, with some onchain researchers’ first list of stolen assets including 62.6 million RLUSD and 27.8 million USD1, so the final split between frozen and swapped RLUSD remains unclear.
The episode also serves as a live test for a stablecoin that has quickly moved into regulated finance, given that RLUSD recently won a Moody’s rating at the same time Coinbase also added $2.6B worth of the token across its platforms this week.
World Liberty and Bitgo Join in
The Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial also moved quickly, with the project’s executive brass saying it was working with Bitgo to freeze the stolen WLFI and USD1 funds and would cooperate fully with the investigation. Yi He thanked the team for the $27m USD1 frozen and 48 million WLFI, worth about $2 million.
Bitgo said it was taking steps to freeze USD1 at a specific address identified by World Liberty Financial, adding that it found no sign of a security issue on its own platform.
Tether, Circle and Coinbase Round out the Lockdown
The biggest freezes came from the largest stablecoin issuers, as Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said his company froze more than 1.567 billion USDT linked to the incident. A little while later, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) credited Circle with freezing about $823 million in USDC, with both freezes having been reported by Bitcoin.com News when billions were starting to leave Binance’s coffers initially.
Smaller players have also followed suit, with First Digital freezing about 3.4 million FDUSD held by the attacker, and Arbitrum’s Security Council freezing 74.56 million ARB tokens in the hacker’s wallet.
Even Binance’s biggest U.S. rival pitched in as Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said his team was blocking sends to compromised wallets and had reached out to Binance to offer help. He wrote:
“Moments like this call for the industry to work together.”
CZ noted that many industry friends and competitors, “including some previously-not-so-friendly ones,” had provided much-needed help. Bo Hines, whose role at Tether’s U.S. arm Bitcoin.com News recently examined, called the response “what responsible leadership looks like.”
How Much Is Still Loose
Binance said the total amount frozen has reached approximately $3 billion. TRM Labs counted about $2.7 billion frozen by Tether, Circle, Ripple, World Liberty Financial and Arbitrum’s Security Council. It estimates more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, about $2.4 billion, remain beyond issuers’ reach.
That gap shows the limit of the approach as issuers freeze work on centralized tokens, but native ETH and BTC cannot be frozen. TRM’s Ari Redbord called the attack a “watershed moment,” and the response will likely fuel debate over how much control stablecoin issuers should hold.
Binance has paused deposits and withdrawals, and Yi He said the exchange will enable withdrawals as soon as its security scan is complete.
