Odaily reported that Cobo co-founder Shenyu released a video reconstructing the suspected Binance theft from an on-chain perspective.
Shenyu said the attacker broadcast a transaction containing 50 authorization requests at 4:20 a.m. on Oct. 30. Roughly three minutes later, assets began moving in batches across multiple chains, including Ethereum and Tron. Based on token prices at the time, the total value of the transferred assets was estimated at about $5.8 billion.
Transfer list covered 64 tokens and test runs were carried out before the attack
According to Shenyu, the attacker used the EIP-7702 authorization mechanism to move the assets. A transfer list covering 64 tokens had been prepared in advance, and two rehearsals were conducted with test wallets. The last drill took place about three and a half hours before the actual attack.
During the operation, the attacker also swapped some freezeable assets, including USDT, into ETH to avoid issuer freezing measures.
Issuers have frozen part of the funds
Shenyu said the latest freeze figures are as follows:
- Tether has frozen 1.38 billion USDT;
- Circle has frozen 823 million USDC;
- Ripple has frozen 40.54 million RLUSD and other tokens.
By chain, about $2.4 billion has been frozen out of the roughly $3.75 billion moved on Ethereum. On Tron, about $380 million has been frozen out of the roughly $630 million moved.
No smart contract vulnerability has been identified on-chain so far
Shenyu said on-chain data suggests the core issue may lie in the signing process, and that no smart contract vulnerability has been found at this stage. Whether the incident was caused by a private key leak or abuse of the signing system still needs to be confirmed by Binance.
He also warned that trading platforms should check whether their signing systems carry a risk of approving unintended authorizations.
The original note added that the roughly $5.8 billion figure refers to the estimated total value of assets moved across multiple chains at the time, rather than a confirmed final theft loss.
