Comment by bravoetch

7 hours ago

What would they sue for? Nobody lost any funds.

Why should we believe Binance when they say all customers will be made whole, and how will they do that, with what money?

It seems very unlikely they have $3-6B lying around ready to repay customer deposits. At the very least this would be catastrophic for them if they do lose all that money.

Have they re-enabled withdrawals yet? If I were a customer I'd be taking everything out as soon as possible.

  • They don't need need money. What was stolen was some sort of "digital assets". How are they going to cover that, I have no idea, but let's not equate crypto assets with money. If someone would have stolen my bike, i wouldn't be saying "they stole $1000". They stole a bike, which could or could not be recovered, and which was or wasn't covered by insurance.

  • > It seems very unlikely they have $3-6B lying around ready to repay customer deposits

    For Binance? I’d actually say very likely. They’d need to move a couple of papers around, but should be easy.

    • their stated plan, for what it’s worth, is that they have $6.34B of company funds set aside, most of it already in the same coins that were taken, plus the SAFU emergency fund at about $1B. around $3B of the stolen money is frozen at Tether, Circle and others, and CZ’s own post on X put the rest of the gap at about $2B.

      withdrawals have been paused since Thursday night. binance says it will reopen them in stages from Sunday and publish proof of reserves by Monday, which is the thing that would actually answer your question.

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  • It is estimated that Binance has revenues of 20 billion and 7-8 billion in profit a year.

    Funds have been already allocated for recovery by the CEO Richard Teng.

Criminal Negligence. They have a history of that.

Binance and its former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, were previously sued for willfully evading anti-money laundering (AML) controls. In that instance, the government ruled their compliance failures were not an accident, but a deliberate criminal enterprise. Binance paid $4.3 billion in fines and forfeitures to settle with the DOJ, CFTC, and FinCEN in November 2023.

It looks to me like Binance will be able to scrape together enough money to make their customers whole, so your probably right.

Next time this happens to Binance though they won't have an emergency fund and possibly they'll be in debt, and that's when the users will be very screwed.

Their terrible security certainly indicates to me that future of Binance is not going to be a pretty one unless they make some enormous changes.

  • I’m sure they could go get some insurance, it’s cost would be a good motivation

    • Insurance has limits especially in cyber. Eg it could be topped out at $200M.