The first thing to know is this: news.bitcoin.com reports the crypto market cap fell to $2.7T after a Binance hack deepened the wider crypto rout. That's not just a blip. It's a drop that came as confidence cracked all at once.
The hack's reach is bigger than one exchange
It's hard to overstate how much weight $6 billion carries in crypto. The FBI confirms North Korea's role in that $6 billion Binance hack, and it's asking the DeFi community to block BTC, ETH, and SOL addresses tied to it. But blocking addresses isn't like freezing a bank account.
Once crypto moves to a new wallet, there's often no central switch to pull it back. So the FBI's call is less about reversing the theft and more about trying to cut off places to cash out.
Withdrawals are coming back, but slowly
People couldn't pull funds for a while, and that fed the panic. Now Binance says withdrawals of XRP, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other coins will resume today, but only in the first phase. That means not everything is open yet.
It's a limited restart, not a full return to normal. And after a big theft, people tend to want their money out all at once, so even a partial restart can test whether the system holds.
A separate flaw is adding pressure
While all this was happening, Threshold says tBTC operators patched or went offline over a Linux flaw. TBTC lets Bitcoin move onto Ethereum as a token, so if operators go offline or stop working, that bridge can get stuck. Fewer ways to move value between chains means less flexibility when markets are already shaky.
It's a different problem than the hack, but it hits at the same time.
What's left to watch
For now, the clock is on Binance's phased restart. If more coins come back online without new snags, the immediate withdrawal squeeze might ease. But with $6 billion still in play and addresses the FBI wants blocked, trust won't snap back overnight.