Inside the $6.36B Binance Hack with Nick Carlsen
25 min
North Korea's hackers have pulled off the largest crypto theft on record, $6.36 billion from Binance, and Nick Carlsen, a former FBI analyst and TRM Labs investigator, was the first to pin it on Pyongyang, within a couple of hours of the first outflows. Nick joins Ari Redbord, TRM Labs' Global Head of Policy, to walk through the afternoon the hack unfolded, the on-chain clues that pointed back to North Korea, and the elite unit he believes was behind it: TraderTrader. They dig into how TraderTrader uses fake job interviews to get inside a target and then waits weeks for the right moment to strike, and how North Korea went from dreaming of becoming an IT services provider to building a premier hacking army. Nick also explains why the sheer size of the theft worked against the hackers, as Tether and Circle froze roughly $2.4 billion within minutes, and what the laundering playbook looks like for the rest, from Tron and Solana across to Ethereum and Bitcoin, with Chinese organized crime networks doing the heavy lifting. Nick closes with a blunt answer on how to stop the next hack: impose a parallel cost on North Korea by going after the Chinese networks it depends on.
