PARIS: The digital-asset industry has just suffered the biggest heist in its brief history with the US$6.3 billion hacking of Binance, the number one crypto platform. Yet the messaging from the top is that things are going to be A-okay.
The company has promised to cover all losses and it says customer funds are safe. The traceability of blockchain transactions has allowed some intermediaries to freeze billions in assets linked to the incident, and Binance says it’s started to recover stolen sums. The market reaction has been relatively contained so far. The price of Bitcoin is down about 2 per cent.
At the risk of going against the unshakable faith of crypto evangelists, however, I’m not sure everything really is okay. There’s a lot we still don’t know about the hack itself, although initial investigations by Binance suggest a software engineer’s compromised laptop was involved.