On Thursday, October 29, on-chain trackers flagged huge outflows from wallets linked to the crypto exchange Binance. Blockaid's first assessment counted about $3.3 billion in suspicious transfers on Ethereum, Arbitrum and Avalanche, and analytics firm Arkham labeled the receiving wallets "binance-hacker-1029"; Cointelegraph reported those wallets held about $5.84 billion, a holdings figure rather than a confirmed loss. The Hacker News post, linking Arkham's tracker, put the theft at $5.6 billion.

Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao said it appeared to be a hack and that he expected user funds to be fully covered. The stablecoin issuers moved to freeze what they could: Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said more than $800 million in USDC had been frozen in coordination with law enforcement, and Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said more than $1.567 billion in USDT was frozen. As of Thursday evening (Pacific), the final size and cause had not been confirmed.

On Hacker News, commenters posted the freeze transactions, asked whether the early numbers could be trusted, and debated what reversible stablecoin freezes mean for crypto's "no take-backs" principle.