if you have funds on binance, whether it's USDT, USDC or other crypto, then you're currently unable to withdraw any funds, this is because of the massive hacked that happened to the exchange twelve hours ago.
Yes, "OMG," this was pretty much my reaction too, because this not not just the biggest hack in crypto history, it's currently creating a lot of FUD which in turn has dumped the price of everything that's crypto.
Before I talk about how this hack happened, this is pretty much the biggest scare in crypto, because if you're reading this, there's an 80% chance that you have some money in binance and you're currently running to withdraw, but let me save you the stress, you CANNOT WITHDRAW, it's been suspended.
Back to how it happened, the north Korean hackers who hacked bybit a few months ago, and bitget too, are responsible for this hack.
The statement is the hack happened because a DEVOP engineer on binance got careless with his laptop, giving the infamous Lazarus group who have hacked multiple exchanges in the past one year an opportunity to hack the exchange.
At the moment, the hackers have successfully diverted $1.5B of the money into their personal funds, and about three billion dollars have been frozen by Circle and tether, so basically the scammers cannot access this, since it's been Frozen, but this doesn't change the fact that three billion dollars is still out there, and one and a half billion dollars is already sitting in the wallets of the scammers.
Binance were quickly able to contact tether and circle within a few hours of the hack and they froze the funds from their backend.
This is why BTC took that ridiculous dump dump from 81k (which it was about 18 hours ago) to about 77k, so while it's still about 3% dump, the real FUD and dump will only begin to happen if after 48 hours as promised by CZ that withdrawals will be allowed, and if people don't immediately get back their money, also, a lot of people are going to "panick withdraw" because apparently binance which is "unhackable" as we all think has been breached.
However, there's honestly no place safe. Someone got hacked for their life savings even though they kept it in a ledger wallet which feels too rigid and too safe.
DEXs which are custodial wallets have a flaw in their smart contract coding which a lot of hackers are currently using to steal people's funds. I remember talking about how I got hacked for almost 4000$ on a DEX wallet.
The fact that AI is advancing makes hackers and scammers gain an edge in trying to break down even the toughest firewalls.
Good news is, binance has $150B in reserves and should be able to cover this losses in 48 hours. Bad news is, the trust has been broken, and the worst of it is that this is probably going to slow down the market for a while...
the stipulations for BTC to hit figures might be delayed by a few months and if you don't know it yet, then I'll tell you, binance is pretty much a huge pillar that holds the survivability of crypto, because like it or not, whether we like to lie to ourselves or not, crypto survival is 50% tanked if binance fails.
It's very much one of the biggest institutional rails that makes adoption possible, either for decentralization and adoption, and sadly crypto is pretty much in serious problems if it actually happens.
For now, the only good news is that binance will cover these losses, CZ is insanely rich, and might even be able to afford to cover this apart from their binance reserves. But the problem is the biggest FUD of not being able get back funds.
I have some funds on binance, so I pretty much panicked and got sweaty, but I did a couple of digging and that relaxed me a little. Binance is pretty much airtight, but the Lazarus group are the biggest scammers in the world and the fact that they're based in North Korea makes them almost untouchable... Really panicky and sad times indeed, but I think binance will weather this storm.
If you're scared, everyone was, it's really scary. Crypto is becoming really unsafe because of the advancement of hackers and I said this a while ago, someone should be building an unbreachable security system, apparently builders are more focused on meme coins.