"The Biggest Bank Robbery"... 5 Trillion Won Withdrawn Amid Growing Anxiety

[Anchor]

As mentioned earlier, the amount stolen by this hacking group is 8.4 trillion won. As user anxiety grows over what is being called the largest bank robbery in history, 5 trillion won was pulled out from the cryptocurrency exchange in just half a day.

Reporter Lee Gang has the details.

[Reporter]

Cryptocurrency media outlet Coindesk and others reported that the amount of Bitcoin stolen by a North Korea-linked hacking group from Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, on October 29 is estimated at 18,270 tokens.

Calculated at the recent average price of 78,000 dollars per token, this amounts to 1.425 billion dollars, or roughly 1.9 trillion won in Korean currency.

This figure is nearly triple North Korea's total merchandise export value of 460 million dollars from last year.

It is 60 percent more than the holdings of Elon Musk's Tesla, which holds a massive amount of Bitcoin, and a staggering 2.3 times the national reserves of El Salvador, which once adopted Bitcoin as legal tender.

In addition to Bitcoin, a large volume of other cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and stablecoins were also stolen in this hack, bringing the estimated total value of the stolen assets to 6.3 billion dollars, or about 8.4 trillion won.

[Ari Redbord / Cryptocurrency Expert : This is the largest "bank robbery" in human history. It is an attack launched against the cryptocurrency ecosystem at an unprecedented speed and scale.]

Binance stated that it has recovered or frozen 3 billion dollars out of the total 6.3 billion dollars in stolen assets.

Co-CEO Richard Teng announced, "Binance, not the users, will shoulder the financial impact caused by the stolen funds."

However, as Binance resumed deposits and withdrawals, user anxiety has not easily subsided, with nearly 5 trillion won being withdrawn in just half a day.

(Video Editing: Park Choon-bae, Design: Hwang Se-yeon)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.