Binance hacker splits $1.4 billion of bitcoin into 19 wallets that no one can freeze
Source: CoinDesk ·
From the source
All 18,270 coins sit in 19 wallets, 17 of them holding exactly 1,000 BTC each, and none has moved since Thursday night, a CoinDesk trace of the blockchain shows. The attacker who drained Binance late on Thursday broke 18,270 stolen bitcoin into 19 separate piles within minutes, then left them alone. At 20:20 UTC, Binance’s hot wallet sent just over 18,270 BTC to one address in 11 transactions, all confirmed in block 973,732. A hot wallet is the internet-connected wallet an exchange uses to pay out customer withdrawals. The coins were worth about $1.4 billion at early Friday prices, or more than two and a half times the 7,000 BTC Binance lost in its 2019 hack (though bitcoin traded under $5,000 at the time). The transactions that split the coins up were confirmed in block 973,732 too, right after the deposits into the receiving address . CoinDesk followed every output using mempool.space data. The coins went through a so-called peel chain, where each transaction carves 1,000 BTC off…