You can check your own box. Just not yet.
A few days ago, I wrote Life Imitates Art: The $6.3 Billion Binance Hack and ended it with “I wonder what is going to happen next week.” It’s Monday morning in New Zealand, and a bunch has already happened.
Binance said it would reopen withdrawals in phases on Sunday, and it did. Bitcoin went first, between 06:00 and 09:00 UTC, followed by 14 other networks, including Ethereum, Solana, and the big stablecoins. CZ’s announcement was four words: “BTC withdrawal is live.”
Customers then did what customers do. By Sunday afternoon, Binance had processed $4.6 billion in withdrawals and $1 billion in deposits, a net outflow of about $3.6 billion, or 2.1% of its $171 billion in assets. (Last week, CNBC said $145 billion. I’ve stopped trying to reconcile crypto numbers.) Binance says the flows are “stabilising.” In chapter 54 of Zero Knowledge, a credit union IT person spends a Friday calling 63 banks trying to get 412 paychecks accepted. By comparison, a 2% outflow isn’t a run. It’s a jog.
Binance says it has now covered 95% of the stolen money, up from 80% on Friday and 90% on Saturday. The remaining 5% is less-liquid tokens it’s still buying. The money came from part of SAFU, part of its futures insurance fund, and its corporate treasury, and Binance says it will refill SAFU to about $1 billion. It also promised a post-incident report once the investigation is complete.
The FBI has officially attributed the hack to North Korea.
Then there’s the proof of reserves, which co-CEO Richard Teng promised by Monday. Binance posted a new reserves snapshot on Saturday, but its latest update says the full proof will be ready “by Tuesday, 2026-11-03 (UTC),” because it takes 40 to 50 hours of computation to generate. The proof is supposed to let each customer check that their balance was included in what Binance owes, without seeing anyone else’s.
It’s a zero-knowledge proof which, well, made me giggle with delight since my book is named Zero Knowledge. If you want to understand the math (and what happens when it breaks), the book’s appendix, How It Actually Works, covers it.
The comments on my LinkedIn post were fun.
William Mougayar wrote, “Binance is not pure crypto. It’s a centralized trading system. That’s where the failures happened.” Jeffrey Vier called it a poor take, since “Stablecoins are blockchain based dollars, not crypto.” I agree with both of them. That was sort of my point - the part that saved Binance’s customers wasn’t the crypto part. Ilya Lichtenstein, who CNN describes as having once stolen $4.5 billion worth of crypto, said the same thing about Tether and its peers: “They’re not truly decentralized.”
Bob Frankston wrote, “I call this the adult supervision problem. Many Bitcoin advocates have magical trust in ’the algorithm’ and a deistic philosophy that systems will work automatically.” Pierre-R. Wolff added that “The notion of anonymous money is now but a fading memory.” And Tom Benedict wrote, “Fiat has its downsides, but when the money is arguably made up, if it’s stolen, it can be made new pretty easily.”
Breaux Walker wrote, “Identity is a problem for crypto that people don’t want to talk about.” Every signature at Binance checked out. The signer just wasn’t who it was supposed to be. In the replies, Derek Scruggs called identity “the most important problem,” and Bob Frankston answered, “Identity is mere ‘=’.”
Vinay Bansal pushed back on how I framed it:
On the Ethereum leg the signatures were not forged. They were produced by Binance’s own signing infrastructure, which was asked to sign something it should have refused. … The chain accepts any valid signature, so it could not tell the difference. In Zero Knowledge a forged signature looks valid. Here a genuine one did.
He also wrote, “If the thing that enforces approval runs on the same host or path as the thing requesting, it was never a control, only a convention.”
Wyeth Ridgway wrote, “I don’t buy the ‘1 laptop’ story. If true imagine the level of incompetence in that architecture. Time will tell.” Binance has also said it found “additional points of breach.”
Robert Moseley IV said crypto’s use cases are “a casino, scams, and sanctions avoidance enabler.” Salima Essakkati pointed out that “The entire economy in Gaza relies on crypto at the moment.”
Serban Ciotlos wrote, “Imagine trusting an exchange with your keys 😂.”
Ivan Nikolov went straight to the plot of Zero Knowledge, where the math does break: “The risks are massive & everybody is chill.”
And Frank Dylan Rosario wrote, “Fiction is fun when you speculate on the obvious. Later calling it prophesy is old world superstition.” I agree. I called it a cliché, not a prophecy.
I’ll check on the proof on Tuesday. Or Wednesday, since New Zealand is living a day in the future.