Oct 30, 2026

Binance Hit by Record $6B Hack as Mistral Opens a Trillion-Parameter Model

Attackers drained an estimated $6 billion from Binance's hot wallets in what may be the largest crypto theft ever, while Mistral released open weights for its trillion-parameter Large 4, DoorDash agreed to buy Instacart, and Reddit moved behind a login.

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A huge security breach at Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, led a busy Thursday in tech. Early estimates put the theft at about $6 billion, which would make it the biggest crypto heist on record. The same day, French AI lab Mistral released the weights of its trillion-parameter flagship model, DoorDash agreed to buy Instacart for about $17 billion, and Reddit said it would put most of its site behind a login as search traffic falls.

Binance: billions drained in minutes

Binance confirmed a security incident on October 29 after users and on-chain watchers saw funds leaving its hot wallets, the internet-connected wallets exchanges use to process withdrawals. As a precaution, the exchange paused withdrawals on several networks and warned users to watch for scams and unofficial links. A spokesperson told TechCrunch that user funds were "completely safe."

The first estimates of the losses varied widely. TechCrunch reported that at least $2 billion had been drained, with some trackers putting it far higher. A timeline compiled by threat-intelligence firm SOCRadar says Binance now puts the impact at about $6.3 billion, spread across roughly ten blockchains, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tron, XRP Ledger and Solana. CNN also reported a theft of about $6 billion. That is roughly four times the size of the 2025 Bybit hack, the previous record.

Binance's early findings point to a compromised laptop belonging to a DevOps engineer. According to SOCRadar's summary, the attacker used it to reach a service that submits withdrawals, so Binance's own systems signed and sent funds to wallets the attacker controlled. Most of the draining happened in about 20 minutes. Binance says it has found no sign that a wallet private key leaked. It has not yet published a full root cause.

The wider crypto industry moved fast to freeze what it could. Tether froze more than $1.5 billion in USDT, and Circle froze about $800 million in USDC, according to both TechCrunch and SOCRadar. Ripple and other stablecoin issuers also froze tokens, and in total close to half of the stolen value has been locked on-chain. Blockchain analytics firms have linked the attack with high confidence to TraderTraitor, a North Korean group, and CNN reported that North Korea is suspected. Neither Binance nor any government has confirmed who did it.

Binance says it will cover all losses from its SAFU emergency fund and its own money. It also plans to publish a technical post-mortem and an updated proof of reserves. Co-CEO Yi He said withdrawals should resume within 48 hours. Bitcoin fell below $77,000 as the news spread.

Mistral opens up "Le Chonk"

Mistral released open weights for Mistral Large 4, a natively multimodal model with about one trillion parameters that the company has nicknamed "Le Chonk." The model was first previewed earlier this month. The weights are on Hugging Face, and the model is also available through Mistral's API, OpenRouter, NVIDIA endpoints and Microsoft Foundry. API pricing is $0.70 per million input tokens and $2.10 per million output tokens.

Mistral is pitching the model at software development and defensive cybersecurity, so governments and businesses can run it on their own hardware. The company's own benchmarks put Large 4 roughly level with China's GLM-5.3 on the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index while using 47% fewer tokens per task. They also show 41% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, up 13 points from the preview. These scores have not been independently verified. The model ships under a modified MIT license that requires a separate commercial license for companies reselling it as a hosted service. Explaining the open approach, VP of Science Pierre Stock told TechCrunch that access "can't be cut off by definition."

DoorDash to buy Instacart for $17 billion

DoorDash agreed to acquire Instacart for about $17 billion, or $65 per share, confirming deal talks first reported earlier in the week. Both boards have approved it. The companies expect the deal to close in late 2027 or the first half of 2028, and they will operate separately until then. DoorDash plans to keep the Instacart brand, app and enterprise technology products. It argues that pairing its restaurant delivery business with Instacart's grocery reach will help grocers build their own online ordering and advertising operations.

Reddit moves behind a login as AI search bites

Reddit said it will shift mainly to a logged-in experience. It cited falling search traffic and a wish to protect its content from AI scrapers. In October the site lost more than a million Google search referrals per week on average. U.S. daily active users fell to 50.7 million in the third quarter, down from 53.2 million in the second, and Reddit warned that overall users could drop by a low double-digit percentage next quarter. CEO Steve Huffman has said Google's AI Mode sends Reddit little traffic. Even so, revenue rose 53% to $895 million. Reddit will start testing the logged-in changes in select markets outside the U.S. this quarter, and users will still be able to stay anonymous.

Why it matters

Thursday's news shows two pressures on the industry. One is security: as more money and infrastructure run through automated systems, a single compromised machine can expose billions. The other is AI's growing effect on how the web works, from open frontier models built for national control to publishers closing off their content as AI answers replace search clicks.