The short version
- North Korea Binance FBI row: Kim Yo Jong called the FBI’s finding that Pyongyang stole more than $6 billion from Binance “a grave political provocation” and hinted the US could be behind it.
- The FBI’s October 31 alert named North Korea’s TraderTraitor, flagged 628 hacker wallets and asked crypto services to block them, so the denial changes nothing on-chain.
- Next: whether any of those 628 wallets moves funds through a service that ignores the FBI’s list. We’ll post it on Base Camp on X the moment we see it.
The North Korea Binance FBI row now has an answer from Pyongyang, and it is a flat no. Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, called the FBI’s finding that North Korea stole more than $6 billion from Binance “a grave political provocation” in a statement carried by state news agency KCNA early on Tuesday in Pyongyang (late Monday UTC).
She did not stop at a denial. She suggested, without evidence, that the US itself could be behind the theft. We covered how the attack unfolded in our Binance hack report.
The statement landed on X within minutes:
INTEL: North Korea's Kim Yo Jong calls FBI's Binance hack probe a 'political provocation'
What Kim Yo Jong Said About the Binance Hack
Kim called the FBI’s claim “absurd rhetoric and nothing new” and said the US “misleads the international public opinion as if all the cybercrimes in different parts of the world are our deeds.” She called it “a sinister attempt to damage the international image” of North Korea and “another grave violation” of its sovereignty.
Then came the twist. She pointed to the Trump administration’s plan to keep seized crypto in a strategic reserve and said whoever ends up holding the recovered funds “may get a clue about who is behind the hacking incident.”
South Korea’s unification ministry said the Kim Yo Jong Binance statement is her first on hacking accusations. Pyongyang usually answers these through its foreign ministry, so sending her shows how seriously it takes this one.
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North Korea Binance FBI Alert: What It Actually Says
The FBI was not guessing. In an alert on Saturday, October 31, it said North Korea “was responsible” for the theft of more than $6 billion from Binance on or about October 29, and named the group TraderTraitor. That is the same unit it blamed for the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in February 2025.
The alert, written with the Secret Service and IRS investigators, lists 628 addresses: 608 on Ethereum, 19 on Bitcoin and one on Solana. It says the hackers have been turning the stolen coins mainly into ETH and asks node operators, swap services, DeFi apps and analytics firms to refuse anything that touches those wallets.
North Korea never admitted Bybit either, and denying the North Korea Binance hack changes nothing on-chain: the addresses stay flagged, and Tether and Circle have already frozen their share of the stolen stablecoins.
SIDE TRAIL: Binance Hack Update: FBI Joins the Case as CZ Tells Musk to Stop Trolling
Why the Denial Matters Beyond Crypto
The timing is awkward for Washington. President Trump has said he is open to meeting Kim Jong Un again, and on Saturday at Mar-a-Lago he played down the hack: “I’m not concerned. We’re learning about it.” He added that the US did not yet know whether North Korea was behind it, the same day his own FBI said it was.
Kim’s statement also said North Korea has “issues to reconsider in diverse aspects” because of the “very unpleasant US hostile attitude.” Seoul’s unification ministry said the effect on any summit is hard to predict. Read plainly, Pyongyang is using the accusation as a reason to stay cold on talks.
For Binance users the practical story is elsewhere. Co-founder Changpeng Zhao has put the uncovered gap at about $2 billion after the frozen funds and the SAFU reserve, and the exchange says it will cover user losses. The question is how much of the rest can still be stopped before it is laundered.
Bitcoin and BNB Price After the Statement
Markets shrugged at the statement itself. Bitcoin trades at $76,900 at the time of writing, down 2% in 24 hours and just above the $76,264 swing low. BNB is at $696, down 2.3%, still under its 50-day moving average at $748, with $680 as the nearest support.
The next real signal is on-chain: whether any of the 628 flagged wallets move funds through a service that ignores the FBI’s list.
TRAIL MAP: Protecting Your Crypto Accounts: 2FA, Passwords and Phishing
VikingXBT has been trading crypto since 2017. The focus is futures, onchain data and automation. Onchain flows get checked before a chart is trusted, and anything repetitive gets automated. VikingXBT built Base Camp's own onchain scanner, which flags bundlers, snipers, dev holdings and wallet clusters in one view, and backtests strategies before trading them.
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