How North Korea Pulled Off the Biggest Heist in History
Source: YouTube · Patrick Boyle · published Nov 6, 2026 · 40:39
North Korea's $6.3B theft from Binance—the largest heist in history—shows crypto survived its biggest crisis by acting exactly like traditional banking 0:32.
Key Takeaways:
• North Korean hackers stole ~$6.3B from Binance, lapping all prior crypto and conventional theft records 0:35
• Blockchains were never breached; the weak point was Binance, whose system "blind signed" 50 notes exploiting Ethereum's EIP-7702 11:53
• The intrusion began with a fake AI tool ad and job-interview malware; hackers then used Binance's own internal AI tool to seize the signing service 16:15
• The "decentralized" response was centralized: Binance froze withdrawals, covered losses, and Tether/Circle blacklisted ~$2.4B 19:28
• Only North Korea stayed true to crypto's ideals, dumping $434M of Tether for Ether at a 12–26% discount 22:46
• The market shrugged: Bitcoin fell only ~5% vs. 19% after FTX—fast tweets and a big balance sheet were rewarded, not security 27:39
Crypto is now more centralized than the system it sought to replace, while the only true decentralization believer sits in Pyongyang 38:38.
Sources:
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First 800 characters of the transcript
I've made quite a few videos about crypto and the comment section usually fills up with people telling me that I just don't get it. Traditional banking is broken, they tell me. And the future is a financial system with no banks where nobody can freeze your money or reverse your transactions. Well, I guess I need to apologize as this week I found a crypto investor who lives by every one of these principles and who stuck to them through one of the most difficult weeks the industry has ever had. It's the North Korean government. Last Thursday, North Korean hackers took roughly $6.3 billion from Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, most of it in the first 30 minutes. Elliptic, a blockchain analysis firm, told the FT that it was almost certainly the largest theft of any kind in history…