Binance hasn’t REcovered $6B+, it’s COVERING it (reimbursing customers from company funds). Some was frozen, but Binance is not likely to recover even half.
Bad headlines like this are a big part of why I started covering crypto. Generalist reporters on deadline far too often end up repeating company spin.
![Tweet by Binance @binance Oct 30 Binance has begun [begun highlight] recovering [end highlight] affected assets for users and continues to work with law enforcement, issuers, blockchain intelligence firms and industry partners to trace, freeze and recover additional funds. The company has already publicly committed to cover losses through company funds in the prior announcement. [begin highlight] Binance has already reserved over $6.34B of company funds to cover this incident. [end highlight] $5B of these funds are already held in the exact token assets that were impacted. We are completing the purchase of the remaining amount by buying token assets through market channels and OTC channels. We are doing this to match the format of the remaining token assets and address any asset shortfalls. This step can take longer because some tokens may have low liquidity and OTC settlement also takes time. We will share more progress as soon as we can. These figures do not include frozen or protected assets, which remain subject to ongoing recovery and verification. Currently, $3bn has been frozen, with thanks to our industry partners. We are working with partners and law enforcement to recover the frozen assets.We will continue to use company resources to cover confirmed shortfall and will provide further verified updates as recovery efforts progress. Ultimately, all user funds will be ve](https://media.hachyderm.io/media_attachments/files/117/541/984/429/284/706/original/9ac9ff3196abe39f.png)
Nov 1, 2026, 3:57 PM@ssiekmann In my experience, a lot of journalists are still pretty unwilling to believe that companies will just lie. And that’s a particularly bad perspective to hold when you’re covering the crypto sector.
@molly0xfff @ssiekmann That's an especially depressing blind spot because it seems like it should be the most familiar part. 'Crypto' likes to exaggerate how much the math really matters; but there are details there that you would expect a finance reporter to need to read up on if they want to get into the weeds. "Shady things happen on quasi-securities markets and people do perjury and fraud sometimes" seem like much more universal concepts.
@fuzzyfuzzyfungus @molly0xfff @ssiekmann Agree. I'd like journalists to get into more detail. Does Binance possess investor's private keys?
@HenryT @fuzzyfuzzyfungus @molly0xfff @ssiekmann Most "investors" don't even understand how cryptocurrency works and don't have possession of their own coins. They just have a pinky-promise from whatever exchange they use that "X amount of coins in the exchange's possession belong to you and are available for you to withdraw" tracked in an ordinary database. It's utter clowncar shit.
@dalias
> and don't have possession of their own coins
That's all there is to say.
And of course it's not the first time.
A never ending story.
.. ohh wait, let me store my gold at fort nox, the donald will guard it well ..
🤷
Nov 1, 2026, 4:56 PM
It would be interesting to know whether it is driven by fear of reprisals by the company (i.e. loss of access), or just a genuinely naive view of the world. Either way not great, of course.
@molly0xfff @ssiekmann Even worse when it's governments/cops.
@molly0xfff @ssiekmann Or tech in general imo. So many lies from this sector...
Nov 1, 2026, 7:01 PM@molly0xfff @ssiekmann companies lie all the time about everything that's why journalism is work but most so called journalists are just PR repeater 🤬
@TheOneDoc @molly0xfff @ssiekmann
Yeah that Orwell quote won't be getting dusty any time soon
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."
Nov 2, 2026, 2:02 PM@davey_cakes @molly0xfff @ssiekmann thanks 😀
I was thinking about that quote but couldn't fully remember it 😞
@TheOneDoc @molly0xfff @ssiekmann I thought you were just alluding to it a knowing way, you could have pulled that off 😀
@TheOneDoc @molly0xfff @ssiekmann
Stenographers to power
@molly0xfff @ssiekmann
Mainstream journalists believe whatever their billionaire bosses want them to believe. The corporate media isn’t journalism. It’s the propaganda arm of the ruling class.
@molly0xfff @ssiekmann i remember Izabella Kaminska ranting about this in 2017 JUST KICK THE FUCKIN TYRES GUYS
Nov 2, 2026, 2:35 PM@molly0xfff Or labor organizing. ;)
@molly0xfff @ssiekmann
So many journalists are just parroting tech bros PR
@ssiekmann It is really a Tech 202 problem….
@molly0xfff How the fuck do they have this much money to just throw away at a moment's notice? Apple's war chest is less than $150b and it's huge.
@molly0xfff Tether is really stupid if they freeze, burn, and reissue for free.
@molly0xfff "Covering" aka, passing the cost on to future customers? k...
Nov 1, 2026, 4:37 PM@neclimdul that's... completely up to the users. If they decide to be customers, they will incur costs.
Nov 1, 2026, 4:16 PM@molly0xfff I wonder how much there is to cover. It apparently makes around £500m a year in profit, so absorbing that much has got to hurt.
The company assets, which could easily cover it, are presumably owned by other people..
Nov 1, 2026, 4:36 PM@tony @molly0xfff Charles Ponzi perfected the business model many decades ago :)
@molly0xfff What I don't understand is, why any losses are the customers' to begin with and need to be covered explicitly. Wouldn't customer funds and Binance's own funds be all in the same wallet(s), and anyone's balance is just a data base entry? It would seem natural to me that the losses get booked on their own balance entry, and at no time have customer funds, or balances be affected.
Nov 1, 2026, 4:38 PM@lnwirz any exchange does have separate wallets for customer funds. The bigger problem is that the customer has to rely on the goodwill of the exchange operator in case of a hack...
@lnwirz @molly0xfff You might think that a financial services company would be required to keep its own funds in the same place as its customers', and carry out the same investments, but in the USA this is an unusual thing you have to specifically look for.
For those interested: you need to look for a certified AIF®, which means they are *legally required* to act as fiduciaries, invest their own money where they invest yours, and also be SEC registered and subject to audit. It also means you can check their SEC registration records to see how many actions have been taken against them. The usual thing you see on financial planners' and managers' business cards is CFP certification, which is much more lax.
Nov 1, 2026, 4:41 PMPlease... I've got at least that much just digging through my couch cushions... :blobfacepalm:
Nov 1, 2026, 4:50 PM
@molly0xfff #Knords fleeced a bunch of #crypto wankers. 🤷🏻♂️ #FAFO #Binance
@molly0xfff the sentence after the one you highlighted says that $5B of the lost assets are the exact token assets that were lost. Why is that not considered recovered? What am I missing? Not supporting them or saying you're wrong, just confused.
@forced_gump they’re saying that the company funds are held in the same asset that they’re replacing. For example, they already held ETH that they’ll use to replace the stolen ETH, without having to convert it from some other asset.
Super secure public ledger that is not controlled by anyone.
Sure enough, the sovereign individual asshats in the world pretended that they found an exit from society. Like everything else, they fantasize about it.
It doesn’t work that way. Crypto is neither safe or secure.
@molly0xfff
So, I was mistaken in thinking that bitcoin, blockchain based assets, intrinsically included something that would prove ownership.
@guardeddon @molly0xfff you're not mistaken, if people keep crypto in their own wallets that's exactly the case. But most people here aren't using crypto as it was originally envisioned - the entire industry has become "financial markets without those pesky rules" so everyone is just yoloing their money to wallets where the company records the entries on a traditional database in order to get interest etc
As @m1ke stated.
To begin with, more than one blockchain is ridiculous, as it drives the idea of not being able to copyPaste and multiply with IT ad nauseum what ever "document" it is you duplicate.
A:
"Nobody can print more bitcoins than there are!"
B:
"Great let's print more blockchains!"
A:
"You can hold your own assets on your own computer, and to skip the need for to hold the entire blockchain here you have an electrum wallet in a decentralized FOSS setup!"
B: "Ohh great, lets create websites where others are in charge of your assets instead your own computer! And while we are at it, let's create shitload of different wallets because why not."
🤷
And actually you are right @guardeddon, everyone would assume that with such an idea and technology even on an exchange, the owner should always somehow have the ultimate key in his very own pocket, his very own "Endgerät".
Ultimately it's like most of the internet things.
Nearly the entire webpage traffic was http, until someday enough capable people said, thx to Ed Snowden, https is the only reasonable thing to do.
Why isn't all email encrypted end to end?
#deltaChat figured out nearly straight away how to do that in a user friendly manner. None of the big companies adapted that FOSS code. No journalist wrote about it.
Well, how to sell you ads if we can't read your emails?
🤮
@m1ke @guardeddon @molly0xfff yeah. it's important to remember that the brochure version of crypto doesn't fucking work in any practical sense so everyone centralises because then they can get anything one
hahahahahahaha!
@molly0xfff Well those are very different things! Sounds like “spin” as you say that will at best be contributed to “nuance”.
But to use the “you wouldn’t steal a car” analogy from piracy, that’s the difference between getting the same car back (complete with your half finished bottle of water in the cup holder) and getting a 1:1 replacement without the car owner paying for it…presumably because the car maker thinks it’s more valuable to keep you driving than for you to decide to take mass transit.
Thank you for the clarification.
Nov 1, 2026, 6:30 PM@molly0xfff Repeating company spin is policy for most media enterprises. Everything else is too expensive. Thank you for your reporting.
@molly0xfff and those people are called stenographers who should be getting stenography machines for xmas
@molly0xfff it's just simple money laundering. They self-regulate so they win either way
so just another ponzi scheme LOL
crypto was the biggest ponzi scheme ever 😀
@molly0xfff #Knords fleeced #crypto wankers for billions. 😂 🤷🏻♂️ #Binance
@molly0xfff Serious question (I really have no idea about how these companies are set up): where do they get that above of money from? ‘Assets’ of their non-victim customers?
@anotherdaniel They say it’s coming from company funds
@molly0xfff So a company built on the scaling of other people’s pyramid schemes has a few billion on hand in “funds”? Again, I don’t know much about this space - but this sounds even more fishy than their regular business.
@molly0xfff If frozen has a meaning for cryptocurrency, then it really isn't "decentralised". Does each cryptocurrency come with a sanctions list these days to stop miners processing specific blocks?
@merospit I explained it a bit in a footnote to https://www.citationneeded.news/its-always-north-korea/
Nov 1, 2026, 8:57 PM@molly0xfff That would have been clearer in most other languages.
@molly0xfff I'd like to know how they can just pull $6+ billion out of their hat like it was nothing. Their reserve was only $1 billion, and what's left is a goodly chunk of change for any company to come up with in cash on short notice.
@tknarr Sure is! And they paid $4.3 billion just a few years ago as a criminal penalty.
@molly0xfff
The single largest theft in the history of the world.....
Move along, nothing to see here.
Nov 2, 2026, 1:57 AM@molly0xfff are they gonna ponzi their way through the other half until they can pull in enough revenue to be sound again or
@molly0xfff I'm having a hard time understanding how they are able to afford such huge loses with no FDIC insurance equivalent.
