Hackers drained about $6.3 billion from Binance on Thursday.

It's the largest crypto theft on record, and it hit the world's biggest exchange.

Binance paused withdrawals right away. It says it has now restored backing for about 90% of the stolen assets using its own money, that BTC, ETH, USDT, SOL, XRP and its other top tokens are fully backed, and that withdrawals should reopen today, Sunday, Nov 1, subject to security checks, per CNBC and CoinDesk. Roughly $3 billion of the stolen funds has been frozen on-chain. Binance's first update pointed to a compromised engineer's laptop, and its co-CEO later called it a more complex attack.

The market didn't wait for the details. Bitcoin fell from about $81,268 to $77,775 on the day of the hack and closed October near $77,517, down about 7% for the month, per Yahoo Finance. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs lost $643 million on Friday alone, their biggest one-day exit since June, which flipped October to about $515 million in net outflows. Ether ETFs bled for 11 straight days.

My exchange-safety checklist for this week:

1. Don't keep more on any one exchange than you actually need for trading. Even the biggest exchange froze withdrawals for days.
2. Check your API keys. Trading keys should never have withdrawal permission, and they should be locked to known IP addresses where the exchange allows it.
3. Turn on withdrawal address allowlists and app-based 2FA, not SMS.
4. Only trust updates from the exchange's official channels. Hacks bring a wave of fake "recovery" and "claim your refund" scams right behind them.
5. Expect a crowd when withdrawals reopen. Don't panic-move everything at once and fat-finger an address.

That's the mindset behind TradeShield: plan for the bad day before it shows up, so you're following your rules instead of the headlines.

Stay sharp out there.

— Spidah, Founder & CEO

Market awareness, not financial advice. Trading involves risk.