Binance’s $6.3bn heist is the biggest . . . but not the first

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has suffered a record $6.3bn heist in an industry increasingly beset by them.

Its scale dwarfs the biggest crypto thefts of recent years. Some of the other most notable are:

Bybit

North Korean hackers stole crypto worth $1.5bn from Bybit in February 2025, according to the FBI, in a heist the digital exchange at the time described as the biggest theft to hit the industry. The hackers stole ethereum, the third most traded crypto coin behind bitcoin and tether.

Ronin

In 2022, hackers stole more than $600mn from Ronin, the digital ledger that powers the popular cryptocurrency game Axie Infinity. They removed 173,600 ether and 25.5mn USD coin.

US officials reportedly tied the attack to Lazarus Group, a squad of hackers working for the North Korean government.

Bitget

Almost $390mn was stolen from Bitget in September, in what at the time was the single largest crypto theft of 2026.

Bitget identified methods “highly consistent” with North Korean hackers and later reimbursed customers from its so-called user protection fund.

Poly Network

Poly Network, a network that links some of the world’s most widely used digital ledgers, in 2021 lost roughly $600mn.

The hacker, dubbed “Mr White Hat”, ultimately returned almost all the stolen funds after a string of unexpected twists, including tipping a bystander $42,000 for alerting them to the fact that some of the stolen assets were being frozen.

Coincheck

An intruder hacked Japanese digital exchange Coincheck in 2018 and made off with 523mn units of the cryptocurrency XEM belonging to 260,000 customers. Coincheck later refunded investors.

South Korea’s spy agency at the time said North Korean hackers were potentially responsible.

Binance

The $6.3bn robbery is not the first to hit Binance. Hackers in 2022 stole roughly $570mn from the exchange, taking about 2mn of the cryptocurrency BNB, Binance’s own digital token.

Mt Gox

The breach in the early 2010s at Mt Gox was a seminal moment for the then nascent industry, exposing vulnerabilities in crypto platforms. Tokyo-based Mt Gox went from being the world’s biggest exchange in its heyday to filing for bankruptcy in 2014, after tokens worth nearly $500mn were misappropriated.