The key facts

  • Trump: “We don’t know. We are looking into it” — attribution of the Binance hack has not yet been established at the state level
  • TRM Labs names the North Korean group TraderTraitor (a Lazarus subdivision) with “high confidence”; the head of Chainalysis agrees
  • Binance suspended withdrawals and promises to cover all losses; about $3 billion is frozen on blockchain networks

The White House refrained from accusations

US President Donald Trump said on Friday that Washington has not yet established whether a North Korean hacker group was behind the hack of the largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance. “We don’t know. We are looking into it,” he told reporters in the Oval Office, answering a question about the attribution of the attack. Anadolu reported this.

What analysts and the exchange itself say

Unlike the White House’s official position, private blockchain analysts expressed confidence in the North Korean trail. TRM Labs said it believes with “high confidence” that the perpetrator of the attack was TraderTraitor, a subdivision of the North Korean Lazarus group; according to its estimate, the hack affected assets worth more than $6 billion. Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin also wrote on X that the attack was likely carried out by the TraderTraitor group. Binance itself has not confirmed the perpetrators: the exchange suspended withdrawals, promised to cover all losses, and said that about $3 billion in assets has been frozen on blockchain networks.

Trump’s comment on returning the funds

Asked whether the stolen funds could be recovered, Trump referred to statements from the exchange itself: “They say they will return them, and they say they guarantee it or something like that.” He added that digital money in principle seems dangerous to him: “These are other people. You never see the money again. That’s why I always considered it a bit dangerous.” He summed it up this way: “They say the situation is pretty much under control. We’ll see.” Thus, the questions of attribution and returning the funds remain open: there is no official conclusion from US authorities, and Binance has not confirmed the analysts’ assessments.