• Binance restarted withdrawals on 15 networks on Sunday. Roughly $5.8bn in net outflows followed over 24 hours, according to figures Cointelegraph attributes to the tracker DefiLlama.
  • Binance’s own count is lower: $4.6bn out against $1bn in, a net $3.6bn, with activity it describes as slowing and stabilising.
  • Every number in this story, including the $171bn in customer assets Binance measures the outflows against, comes from Binance or from third-party wallet trackers. None of it has been independently audited.

Withdrawals are moving again at the world’s largest crypto exchange, and so are a lot of customers. Binance restored withdrawals on 15 networks at the weekend, and by its own account $4.6bn left in the hours that followed. Outside trackers put the figure higher still.

If you hold coins on an exchange, the thing you actually want to know after a theft this size is whether the money is still there. A big outflow number doesn’t answer that, and neither does a reassuring one. Withdrawals reopening is a reasonable sign, because an exchange that can’t pay people tends not to let them ask. But the figures being quoted on both sides of the argument come from the company itself or from analysts watching wallets from the outside, and that’s a weaker form of evidence than most coverage makes it sound.

What actually restarted

This followed what has been reported as a $6.3bn hack of Binance, the largest crypto theft on record, which the FBI has attributed to North Korea. Binance said on Saturday that it had replaced 90% of the lost assets using corporate treasury funds, its Secure Asset Fund for Users and its futures insurance fund. That is the company’s own statement, and no auditor or regulator has confirmed it in the material available.

Withdrawals came back at 06:00 UTC on Sunday, covering across 15 networks including Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain and the XRP Ledger, with the rest to follow in phases. Phased matters. This is not the exchange back to normal; it’s a partial reopening, and Binance hasn’t said when the remaining networks come back or which assets are still stuck.

What a net outflow figure measures

High angle view of people queuing at a bus stop with visible road markings and rusty roof.
People queuing at a bus stop. Withdrawal queues at exchanges are usually digital, but the outflow figures show how many customers headed for the exit. Photo by Wenjin G on Pexels.

The $5.8bn is a read of money moving out of wallets analysts believe belong to Binance, minus money moving in. It isn’t a balance sheet and it isn’t an audit.

It also doesn’t tell you why anyone moved. Some of that will be people who have decided they’d rather hold their own keys. Some will be deposits at rival exchanges. Some will be sales. Some will be market makers and trading desks rebalancing positions that had been frozen for days, which is a mechanical consequence of the halt rather than a verdict on Binance. The single number flattens all of that into one direction of travel.

Binance’s own count differs from the tracker’s, which is normal: the company sees every internal movement and the trackers see only the addresses they’ve identified. Neither view is complete.

The framing to notice

Binance has consistently paired the outflow figures with the roughly $171bn it says it holds in customer assets, which makes $5.8bn look like loose change. On the arithmetic, it is: a little over 3%. The weakness in the comparison is that the denominator is Binance’s own number too. Exchanges publish proof-of-reserves pages to address exactly this, and they’re better than nothing, but a proof-of-reserves page is a snapshot the company attests to itself, usually showing assets without a matching picture of liabilities. It is not an audit, and it isn’t a guarantee you can withdraw tomorrow.

The same goes for “stabilising”. That describes a window measured in hours, during an event that is still running.

Where a UK customer stands

Not where many people assume. The Financial Conduct Authority has regulated how crypto firms market themselves to UK consumers since October 2023, so promotions have to carry risk warnings and a cooling-off period applies to new customers. That regime governs advertising. It does not make an offshore exchange’s custody safe, and the Financial Services Compensation Scheme does not cover crypto held on an exchange. If an exchange can’t return your coins, there is no British backstop that returns them for you. Our guide to self-custody covers the alternative, along with the risks that come with it, because holding your own keys trades one set of problems for another.

Elsewhere, the effects are still showing up. US spot bitcoin shed $643m on Friday, their largest single-day outflow since late June, which The Block linked to the hack.

What to watch

Whether the remaining networks come back on schedule, and whether Binance puts a date on them. A phased restoration that keeps extending is a different story from one that completes.

Then the verification. An independent attestation of the 90% replacement claim, or updated proof-of-reserves data covering the period after the theft, would turn the company’s assurances into something a customer could check. Until one of those lands, the reassuring numbers and the alarming ones are both coming from the same place.