Binance-Linked Wallets Sent $296 Million in XRP During Breach

Five wallets linked to Binance transferred 233.46 million XRP to a single address in a four-minute span on Oct. 29, a movement valued at about $296 million and tied to the exchange’s reported security breach.

The transactions took place from 4:05 to 4:09 p.m. ET (20:05 to 20:09 UTC). The first transfer moved 185,017,485 XRP at 4:05 p.m. ET; all five transfers combined totaled 233.46 million XRP.

Binance estimated the overall incident’s impact at about $6.3 billion in an update posted at 10:23 p.m. ET Oct. 29. The exchange said about $3 billion had been frozen on-chain by then. The XRP transfers were one part of a broader incident involving multiple crypto networks.

Binance’s preliminary review indicated that a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop may have enabled access to a service container used to submit unauthorized withdrawals. The exchange said it had found no evidence of a wallet private-key leak and planned to publish a technical postmortem after its investigation.