Tether said on Nov. 2 that it had frozen more than $1.5 billion in USDT within 30 minutes of the Oct. 29 Binance attack, preventing those tokens from being moved. Bitquery’s onchain analysis placed the first freeze 37 minutes after the main Ethereum drain and found that about $729 million in stolen USDT moved before the freezes took effect. Freezing tokens restricts transfers from specified addresses; returning them to victims requires further recovery steps.
The FBI attributed the theft of more than $6 billion to North Korea. Binance separately reserved more than $6.34 billion in company funds to replace affected assets, excluding about $3 billion frozen during the response. Those purchases addressed its obligations to users independently of efforts to recover the stolen assets.
