Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by daily trading volume, said on Thursday it had suffered a major hack and had frozen assets worth more than $2.5 billion to prevent them from being stolen.

The platform also suspended trading on some products, while insisting that "user funds are completely safe." Several experts, however, said large quantities of assets appeared to have been stolen.

"It does indeed look like a hack of Binance," said Changpeng Zhao, the exchange's former chief executive, who has stepped away from running the platform but still holds a majority stake.

Other major players in the crypto market moved quickly. Paolo Ardoino, chief executive of Tether, which issues the USDT token, said his company had frozen around $1.6 billion "linked to a possible Binance hack." Jeremy Allaire, head of Circle, said his firm had frozen more than $800 million in USDC. Both USDT and USDC are stablecoins, digital currencies whose value is pegged to the US dollar.

Hours before Binance confirmed the breach, a number of industry observers had flagged that hackers appeared to have gained access to the platform. Some suggested the attack could prove to be the largest of its kind on record, surpassing the $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit exchange in February 2025, an incident attributed at the time to hackers linked to North Korea.

Bitcoin fell more than 3 percent as news of the hack spread.