If you use Binance in Nigeria, you probably woke up this morning to panic messages and you are not alone.
Binance, the world's biggest exchange where most of us buy USDT and do P2P, was hacked yesterday October 29th in what is now officially the biggest crypto theft ever. About $6.3 billion was stolen, which at today's official Nigerian rate of ₦1,346.86 per dollar at the NFEM window is roughly ₦8.48 trillion Naira, so your 8.4 trillion figure is spot on. In Korea they reported it as 8.4 trillion Won, but converted to Naira it's the same scale.
This is more than four times the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in February 2025 that we thought was the worst ever.
How did it happen? Binance said in their first investigation on X that the hacker didn't break private keys. They compromised a DevOps engineer's laptop, got into an internal service container, and then made the system submit unauthorized withdrawals. According to blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs, the whole thing took just about 20 minutes and $6.36 billion was moved across 10 blockchains in that window. Arkham Intelligence tracked 70 wallets linked to the hacker holding $5.788 billion at one point, including 1.768 billion USDT, 18,270 Bitcoin, 497,976 Ether and about 824.6 million USDC.
Who did it? TRM Labs and Chainalysis said with high confidence it was TraderTraitor, which is North Korea's elite Lazarus group under their Reconnaissance General Bureau, same group the FBI blamed for Bybit. The FBI had called them TraderTraitor back in 2025.
What has Binance done since? They immediately suspended all deposits and withdrawals, revoked the affected permissions, and started working with partners to freeze the money. So far they've frozen about $3 billion on-chain, which is close to half. Tether's CEO Paolo Ardoino said they froze more than $1.5 billion in USDT, Circle froze over $800 million in USDC, and Ripple froze around $200 million in RLUSD.
Will Nigerian users lose money? Binance co-founder Yi He and co-CEO Richard Teng both posted that user funds are safe and Binance will cover the entire loss from their SAFU emergency fund and company reserves. The SAFU fund holds about $1.23 billion in Bitcoin alone, and WSJ reported Binance has reserved over $6.3 billion total to cover it, including $5 billion in the same coins that were stolen and buying back the remaining $1.3 billion from the market. They said deposits are unaffected and they'll publish a new Proof of Reserves after the fix.
But the market still bled. Bitcoin fell more than 3% to $76,368, its lowest in six weeks, Ether dropped to $2,178, and BNB fell 8.7% from $744.90 to $680 within an hour. About $1.55 billion in leveraged positions got wiped, hitting over 239,000 traders.
So what does this mean for you in Nigeria?
If you have funds on Binance, don't panic and don't keep trying withdrawals right now because withdrawals are paused for security checks. According to Binance your funds are covered. P2P will likely be slow until they reopen, which they are targeting by Sunday. This is also a strong reminder not to leave all your savings on one centralized exchange. A lot of Nigerian traders now split between Binance and self-custody like Trust Wallet or a hardware wallet.
Binance says a full technical report is coming once the investigation is done.
Not financial advice. Just stay safe and don't click any fake Binance refund links flying around Telegram.
Follow for updates.
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