Onchain & stablecoins 7 min read
If your exchange gets hacked, what happens to your coins?
Digby walks through the Oct 29 Binance hot-wallet theft to show why USDT and USDC can be frozen while ETH and BTC cannot, and what coverage claims mean.
“Elliptic's later laundering tracker, last updated Nov 9, 13:15 UTC, still put the frozen or seized total at $2.85B (Elliptic tracker).”
When coins sit on an exchange, they usually sit in the exchange's wallets, not in a wallet the holder alone controls. Digby dug into the October 29, 2026 Binance hot-wallet theft — with figures checked against Chainalysis, Elliptic and Binance's own updates as of November 9, 2026 (America/Los_Angeles) — to ask a practical question: if an exchange gets hacked, what happens to those coins, and why does the coin type matter?
The same incident is counted three ways. Digby keeps them labelled by source rather than picking a single "true" total:
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