CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said the roughly $6.4 billion Binance theft supports the agency’s proposed rules for offshore crypto exchanges. He argued that allowing exchanges to register with the CFTC would bring them under U.S. cybersecurity standards; the rules have not been adopted.
Selig said he believed a laptop-introduced vulnerability, not a flaw in Ethereum, enabled the attack. Binance said its investigation found additional points of breach and that the attack did not simply use one engineer’s permissions. The theft also involved an Ethereum feature that let the attacker drain a Binance hot wallet, while TRM Labs said the broader breach pointed to compromised signing infrastructure rather than a blockchain weakness.
