Crypto: Gate Freezes Two Accounts Linked to Binance Hack

Bad luck for the hacker. Gate announced the freezing of two accounts funded by the money attributed to the Binance hacker, after $250,000 was transferred on the platform in twelve hours. Lookonchain raised the alarm. Its analysts have been tracking the attacker's addresses since the first minutes of the incident, and there are rarely more than a few hours to act between the outflow of funds from a wallet and their arrival in a client account.

Key Points

• Two accounts blocked by the Gate platform after suspicious deposits
• A quarter of a million dollars moved in half a day and spotted by Lookonchain analysts
• The splitting of deposits is hindered by the holding of keys by centralized exchanges
• Bybit had blocked tens of millions using the same method in 2025

Gate Freezes Two Accounts Linked to Binance Hack

This freeze results from a public report. Lookonchain identified a series of transfers to Gate deposit addresses, amounting to approximately $250,000 accumulated over twelve hours. The exchange subsequently confirmed the blocking of two accounts linked to these fund inflows.

The splitting into small deposits is the most common tactic of on-chain money laundering. Dividing a sum into payments of a few tens of thousands of dollars allows one to hope to stay below the thresholds that trigger a manual review at the platforms. On a centralized exchange, this exercise faces a simple limit. The accounts are custodial, the platform holds the keys, and a compliance officer can block withdrawals in seconds. A self-hosted wallet cannot be frozen remotely.

For the attacker, going through Gate incurs an additional cost. Opening an account requires identity verification, or purchasing an already verified account on a parallel market. In both cases, the platform retains IP addresses and identity documents that end up in the hands of investigators. The tracking of funds from the Binance hack continues -- Source: X Account

The Bybit Precedent and On-Chain Tracking of Stolen Funds

However, freezing an account remains a discretionary decision. The Bybit hack changed practices. On February 21, 2025, the exchange lost approximately $1.46 billion in ethers after the signing of a forged multisig transaction. The FBI attributed the operation to the North Korean group Lazarus. Bybit and its partners subsequently had tens of millions of dollars blocked at the platforms traversed by the funds.

Services that refuse to cooperate sometimes end up worse off. eXch (an instant exchange platform without identity verification) was used for recycling part of Bybit's loot and publicly refused to block anything. On April 30, the German federal police seized its servers and the equivalent of 34 million euros in cryptocurrencies.

Public records indeed work for investigators. Every movement of the hacker is timestamped and accessible by anyone, forever. A fraudulent bank transfer, on the other hand, disappears into closed systems that only a few regulators can access.

Binance has had its own insurance fund since 2018. Funded by a portion of trading fees, the SAFU (Secure Asset Fund for Users) amounts to about one billion dollars held in stablecoins. It had covered the entire 7,074 bitcoins stolen from the platform in May 2019 (which were worth $40 million at the time, and several hundred million today).

The $250,000 immobilized at Gate is just a fraction of the moving funds. They mainly open a door for investigators, who now have two identified accounts, their registration documents, and the complete history of deposits. Lookonchain continues, like other industry specialists, to track and publish the still-active addresses of the hacker.

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