Biggest Crypto Hack Ever Drains $6.36B in 20 Minutes

$6.36 billion in crypto drained from one of the world's largest exchanges on October 29, with most of the funds gone in roughly 20 minutes across 10 different blockchains. It is the biggest crypto theft on record, about four times the previous high set in 2025. The exchange halted withdrawals mid-drain and the money kept leaving anyway, because the attackers were moving funds with the venue's own valid signatures. The FBI has attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking group, and the exchange says it has already replaced about 98% of what was taken, with around $2.85 billion frozen or intercepted.

Why it matters

The intrusion started months earlier. Attackers probed the exchange from June and got inside by September through a fake job interview, then worked through internal systems, including an internal AI tool, until they reached the system that signs withdrawals. On Ethereum, they used EIP-7702 to delegate control of a hot wallet to their own code. That permission sat on-chain, so pausing withdrawals didn't cancel it.

The event caps a record year. DefiLlama has counted 325 crypto hacks in 2026 through October, more than double last year's tally, with $8.74 billion lost, the worst total in its data. Strip out the October event and the year looks ordinary in dollar terms, but the attack count keeps climbing either way. Elliptic had already tied over $1 billion of 2026 thefts to North Korea before this breach, and a month earlier another major exchange lost $387.5 million from its hot and warm wallets.

Market impact

The breach puts custody design, not cryptography, at the center of the security debate. Attackers in 2026 are targeting people, laptops and AI tools with signing permissions rather than breaking the underlying math, so the questions that matter for any venue are whether assets are held one-to-one, how much sits in cold storage, what blocks an anomalous transfer, and who audits the books.

Self-custody moves the risk rather than removing it. Chainalysis counted $713 million stolen from personal wallets in 2025, and CertiK logged about $445 million in wallet compromises plus $366 million in phishing in the first half of 2026, with no freeze function, no reversal and no support line to call. ETFs and institutional custodians take key management out of users' hands entirely, at the cost of trusting a fund structure and giving up direct control of the coins. Watch for hardened signing controls and anomaly detection becoming the baseline every exchange gets measured against.