Reserves Recovery Reaches 90 Percent as Exchange Preps for Withdrawal Resumption
Binance confirmed on Saturday that it had replenished 90% of the assets drained in the $6.3 billion hack that struck the platform on Thursday, marking a significant jump from the 80% figure reported just a day earlier. The exchange said it remains on schedule to reopen customer withdrawals on Sunday.
The remaining shortfall, according to the exchange, is concentrated in lower-liquidity tokens. Binance is closing that gap by purchasing replacement assets through both standard market orders and over-the-counter (OTC) transactions, a spokesperson confirmed to Cointelegraph.
Funding the Shortfall: Treasury, SAFU, and Insurance Pool
To cover the losses, Binance is drawing on three distinct internal sources: its corporate treasury, a partial release from the Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU), and a portion of its futures insurance fund. The spokesperson stressed that the financial burden of the theft would be borne entirely by the exchange rather than its customers.
"Binance will absorb the financial impact of the stolen funds, not users," the spokesperson stated, while adding that the futures insurance fund would continue to sit above the minimum levels required by its own risk-management framework.
Notably, the spokesperson did not break down how much each of the three funding sources contributed to the recovery, nor did the statement specify the insurance fund's minimum required balance or quantify the amount of stolen cryptocurrency that has been directly recovered.
Attribution, Industry Response, and Verification Challenges
The Thursday heist, now the single largest cryptocurrency theft in history, has been attributed by blockchain-analytics firm TRM Labs to the North Korean hacking collective known as TraderTraitor.
In the immediate aftermath, Binance announced on Friday that it had earmarked $6.34 billion to cover the losses, of which roughly $5 billion was denominated in the affected cryptocurrencies themselves. Separately, industry partners including Tether and Circle moved to freeze approximately $3 billion in tainted assets flowing through their networks. Binance clarified that those frozen funds are distinct from the tokens it is actively replacing for customers.
Verification of the exchange's claims, however, has not been straightforward. Security auditor CertiK told Cointelegraph on Friday that it required additional data to independently confirm Binance's stated $5 billion in replacement holdings. Binance has since published an updated reserves snapshot, but the firm noted that the full cryptographic proof of reserves is still in the process of being generated.
"The full zero-knowledge proof takes approximately 40 to 50 hours to generate due to the computational workload," the exchange's update on X read.
Which Balances Are Fully Backed?
In its Saturday update posted on the social platform X, Binance stated that customer balances denominated in Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and eight additional assets are now fully backed. The residual gap, as noted earlier, is limited to less-liquid tokens that the platform continues to source through open-market purchases and bilateral OTC deals.
The rapid pace of the recovery—moving from 80% to 90% in roughly 24 hours—suggests that the exchange's liquidity management and counterparty relationships are functioning under significant pressure, even as full third-party verification of the reserves remains pending.
