Binance, which was founded in China in 2017, allows users to trade digital assets and is estimated to have more than 300 million registered users worldwide.<\/p>\n
The company said in 2024 that it had more than $160bn in assets under its custody.<\/p>\n
A lot of the fear right now from Binance users – and the crypto industry at large – is whether or not Binance will actually be capable of covering this enormous financial loss.<\/p>\n
The company has said repeatedly that customer funds will be covered and that the firm is strong enough to weather the storm.<\/p>\n
But crypto history watchers have been pointing out online that this is exactly the kind of message that FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried gave before his crypto exchange collapsed in 2022, leading to huge losses for customers and the industry.<\/p>\n
Several experts have warned customers not to regard Binance’s promise to cover losses as legally binding and said they may need to pursue litigation to recover them.<\/p>\n
Daniel Tunkel, of the London-based Edwin Coe law firm, said that would “come down to what [customers] have been promised in their contracts”, and “where Binance can be sued for non-performance, if it comes to it”.<\/p>\n
Binance has been subject of regulatory scrutiny around the world.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, AI-powered investigations company TRM Labs said that several elements of the attack resembled earlier North Korean-linked incidents, including the Bybit hack.<\/p>\n
In the last five years the crypto industry has been beset by enormous losses from hackers.<\/p>\n
In nearly all cases investigators have blamed hackers from North Korea, pointing to the infamous Lazarus Group – also know as TraderTraitor. The names refer to clusters of cyber criminals accused of working directly for the regime.<\/p>\n
Chainalysis, a crypto analytics firm, said it had “high confidence” that a North Korean is linked to the hack.<\/p>\n
North Korea is an impoverished country with very little industry and heavy international sanctions and experts say the regime uses cyber crime as a way to bring money in.<\/p>\n
North Korea has always denied this, but the wealth of evidence from cryptocurrency flow analysis and insider interviews from defectors is compelling. <\/p>\n
It makes North Korea likely to be the only nation that uses hacking as a way to raise public funds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Binance, which was founded in China in 2017, allows users to trade digital assets and is estimated to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":819064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-819063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/819064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}