Trump says US would contact North Korea if it’s tied to the $6.3 billion Binance hack

President Donald Trump says the US would reach out to North Korean officials if investigators confirm Pyongyang was behind the Binance hack. That breach drained approximately $6.3 billion from the world’s largest crypto exchange.

Trump made the remarks on October 30 and 31, as the fallout from the October 29 breach spread. He framed outreach to North Korean authorities as conditional on confirmation of the link.

What happened at Binance

The attackers took digital assets spread across ten different blockchains. Most of the funds moved in about 20 minutes.

Blockchain analytics firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis moved quickly to name a suspect: TraderTraitor. That is a North Korean state-sponsored hacking group tied to earlier high-profile attacks, including the Bybit breach in 2025.

On October 31, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) backed that attribution. The bureau also urged industry participants to block wallet addresses linked to the operation.

A substantial portion of the stolen assets has reportedly been converted primarily to Ethereum (ETH). No specific tokens have been singled out beyond that.

How Binance is responding

Binance says it is using roughly $6.34 billion in corporate resources to cover about 90% of the stolen assets. That puts the exchange’s own balance sheet between the hackers and its customers.

The exchange also froze affected accounts, working alongside stablecoin issuers. About $2.7 billion in stablecoins has been frozen.

By early November, Binance began cautiously resuming withdrawals.

A familiar name with a bigger haul

TraderTraitor is not a new character in this story. The group has been connected to the roughly $1.5 billion Bybit theft in February 2025, which at the time stood as a landmark crypto heist.

The Binance haul is more than four times that size. It also nearly doubles North Korea’s known proceeds from comparable operations.

What this means

The most immediate question is diplomatic. Trump’s conditional pledge to contact North Korean officials moves a crypto security incident into the realm of state-to-state relations, and the FBI’s attribution already supplies much of the confirmation he described.