Binance loses $6.3 billion after DevOps laptop breach

Binance suffered the largest crypto theft on record, losing approximately $6.3 billion across ten chains after an attacker compromised a DevOps engineer's laptop and gained access to the exchange's hot wallet signing system. Stablecoin issuers and layer-two security councils subsequently froze roughly $2.7 billion in stolen assets, while Aave markets experienced emergency freezes and high utilization rates as a result of the incident. The author argues that this event underscores the severe risks of keeping large amounts of capital in centralized hot wallets rather than self-custody. Open article →