Are my funds safe on Binance after the hack?
Binance says users will lose nothing and that it will cover the entire loss. What stands behind that promise, how much the exchange holds and what the SAFU fund is.
Are funds safe on Binance after the October 29, 2026 attack is the first question for millions of users of the world’s largest crypto exchange. According to the exchange, they are. Co-founder and co-CEO Yi He said at about midnight UTC that “user funds are safe” and that “Binance will cover all hacking losses.”
Crypto worth between $5.3 billion and $5.9 billion left the exchange’s hot wallets, according to estimates from Glassnode and Chainalysis. Binance has not yet published its own loss figure.
What does Binance say about user funds?
From the start, Binance has said customer funds are not at risk. Founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ), who stepped down as chief executive in 2023, said the same: “I don’t manage Binance anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered.”
Zhao added that the loss “might be a bit higher” than reported estimates, but that the exchange “will cover” it. Yi He said Binance will share a full post-mortem once the investigation is complete.
Two things should be kept apart. What was stolen was crypto from the hot wallets, the ones the exchange keeps online for everyday withdrawals. Balances on user accounts are the exchange’s ledger entries, and Binance says those remain untouched.
Does Binance have enough money to cover the loss?
According to DefiLlama, Binance held about $144 billion in assets before the attack. The highest estimate of the amount taken is therefore about four percent of total assets.
Part of the money has already been stopped. Binance says the verified total of frozen assets is $2.54 billion. Most of that was frozen by stablecoin issuers: Tether more than 1.567 billion USDT and Circle more than 800 million USDC.
Evgeny Gaevoy, chief executive of trading firm Wintermute, wrote that “Binance has enough to withstand 3-4x of current hit and still be largely intact.” That is an outside assessment, not a figure from the exchange.
What is the Binance SAFU fund?
SAFU stands for Secure Asset Fund for Users. Binance set it up in 2018 as an emergency reserve. The fund currently holds about $1 billion in bitcoin.
SAFU alone cannot cover a loss of several billion dollars. Binance has not confirmed whether it will use it at all, so most of any compensation would have to come from the exchange’s own balance sheet.
How did Binance cover its loss in 2019?
This is not the first time Binance has been hacked. In May 2019, hackers stole 7,000 bitcoin, then worth about $41 million. The exchange covered the loss from SAFU, and users did not lose money.
Deposits and withdrawals were halted for about a week while the exchange overhauled withdrawal validation, two-factor authentication and API access. The current attack, however, is more than a hundred times larger.
What is still unconfirmed?
Several key points have not been officially confirmed:
- The final loss. Estimates range from $5.3 billion to $5.9 billion.
- The method. Misuse of the EIP-7702 feature on Ethereum is most often cited, but how the attacker obtained the signature has not been established.
- The attacker. Investigator ZachXBT and Blockaid believe North Korea is likely behind the attack, but there is no official attribution.
- When withdrawals reopen. Binance has not given a date.
For now, users have a public promise from the exchange and its founder that no one will bear the loss. That promise will be tested once withdrawals resume.
