The FBI said that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) was responsible for the theft of about $6.3 billion in digital assets from cryptocurrency exchange Binance on Thursday.
The FBI said on Saturday in a news release that it refers to this specific North Korean malicious cyber activity as “TraderTraitor,” which it has most recently observed converting stolen assets mostly into Ether (ETH).
It expects these assets to be further converted, using DeFi and instant swap services, as the hackers move to more advanced laundering stages.
The FBI urged private sector entities including THORNode operators, RPC node operators, instant exchanges, DeFi services, blockchain analytics firms and other digital asset service providers to block transactions with or derived from addresses TraderTraitor actors are using to launder these stolen assets. A full list of addresses is provided on the news release.
Cointelegraph reported earlier this year that North Korea-linked hackers stole about 60% of the value lost to crypto hacks in 2025, with proceeds used to help fund the regime’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, highlighting a growing reliance on digital assets to generate hard currency.
North Korean defense spending supplemented
Related: Crypto losses from North Korea hackers in 2025 rose 51% YoY: Report
Those findings came from a CertiK report that attributed more than $2 billion of an estimated $3.4 billion in 2025 crypto security losses to groups tied North Korea, across 79 of 656 incidents documented that year.
While North Korea does not publish credible budget data, according to independent research organization MilitarySpend, mid-range consensus places its actual annual defense spending at as much as $6 billion, using purchasing-power-adjusted GDP estimates, though this figure is uncertain.
MilitarySpend adds that revenue from Russia arms transfers — estimated at as much as $5 billion in munitions exported to Russia from 2022-2025 per South Korean intelligence — supplements domestic weapons programs, as does cryptocurrency theft, which provides additional off-budget financing for WMD development.
As Cointelegraph reported, between 2016 and early 2026, North Korea-linked actors stole an estimated $6.75 billion in cryptocurrency across 263 documented incidents, according to CertiK, citing findings by independent onchain researcher Taylor Monahan.
CertiK’s analysis concluded that North Korea has industrialized crypto theft into a core state revenue mechanism.
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