On Thursday, over the course of just a few hours, hackers drained $6.3 billion from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. While the facts of the case are still emerging, it is easily the biggest crypto heist to date, and blockchain forensics firm TRM Labs has attributed it to a North Korean government-sponsored hacking group called TraderTraitor. Behind the dazzling numbers, the event reveals just how much power private corporations wield over a technology that is becoming inextricable from money itself.

The stolen funds were denominated in several different cryptocurrencies. More than half the amount comprised stablecoins — tokens that have their value pegged to a fiat currency, most often the dollar. Stablecoins are effectively digital proxies for the dollar that are issued by private companies. The largest of these companies is Tether, whose token is USDT. Designed and programmed by their issuers, stablecoins afford that issuer a great deal of oversight. Tether and other implicated stablecoin companies have already frozen the stolen funds over which they have control, amounting to around $2.7 billion. The rest of the loot is denominated in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum which, having no centralized issuer, are much harder to freeze or claw back.

It is notable that the only directly state-associated actors in this whole episode are the thieves themselves. Law enforcement agencies are and will continue to be involved in the case, but this huge financial crime has taken place almost entirely in the realm of private corporations. Billions of dollars worth of privately-issued money have been stolen from a privately owned custodian, traced by private investigators, and much of it rendered useless from a privately-owned central point of control.

The technological and economic underpinnings of cryptocurrency are still not widely understood by the layperson, but it has come a long way from its obscure, cypherpunk origins. The barriers to entry have been dropping rapidly and the technology is now incorporated behind the scenes in popular applications such as Polymarket, the blockchain-based prediction market that doesn’t require its users to be familiar with crypto. Payment giants including Visa and Mastercard are building infrastructure to use stablecoins, while Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino has previously boasted of the company being “the stronghold for US dollar hegemony”.

Ardoino can make such a bold claim because, since the passage of the GENIUS act in 2025, stablecoins have been steadily working their way into the mainstream monetary architecture of the dollar. The act required US-based stablecoin companies to back their issuance with assets including treasuries, making them a serious strut to the giant edifice of American debt. Tether and Circle, the two largest US dollar stablecoin issuers, currently hold more US treasuries than South Korea or Germany.

Understand it or not, crypto is money now; but it is money that is issued, custodied, traced and burned by corporations. This represents a complete inversion of the founding ethos of cryptocurrency, which was conceived specifically to eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries when transferring value. Instead, it has created a new class of extraordinarily powerful intermediaries — ones which may be regulated, but which ultimately obey the basic corporate imperative of profit.

Half of the money stolen by the Binance hackers remains at their disposal because it is denominated in Bitcoin and other tokens that are specifically designed to function with no overarching point of control. At first glance this might appear to be a weakness, as it has resulted in the attackers keeping hold of ill-gotten gains. But the vulnerability came from them being kept on Binance, a centralized entity. Had those funds been stored on offline wallets held by their owners, they would not have been exposed to the hack. Within seasoned crypto circles, “not your keys, not your coins” is an article of faith. If you give up custody, you risk giving up ownership.

Binance has announced that no users will be left out of pocket by the theft. But when the dust settles it will still be the companies, not the state, overseeing the next generation of money.