Trump Responds to Binance Hack as Pressure Builds for US Crypto Rules

The reported $6.3bn Binance hack has intensified Washington’s debate over cryptocurrency oversight, with President Donald Trump saying the incident was being examined and industry leaders urging Congress to act.

The breach has brought two questions into focus: whether stronger US supervision could improve exchange safeguards, and whether proposed legislation would help firms freeze stolen assets more quickly.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Trump said he was looking into the attack and noted Binance’s commitment to returning customers’ funds.

"But it's a hack," he said. "That's the problem. You know the old-fashioned way when you used to sign a check… these are different people, never see the money anymore. So I've always felt it was a little bit dangerous."

Offshore exchanges face renewed scrutiny

Binance said preliminary findings pointed to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to access a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions.

Blockchain analytics firms, including TRM Labs, attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean hacking unit.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Michael Selig argued that the incident reinforced the case for bringing cryptocurrency trading under a federal regulatory framework.

"This proves our exact point in proposing regulations for crypto markets earlier this month," Selig told CNBC. "The real issue here is that these are unregulated offshore exchanges, and they don't have the same safeguards that we have in our financial markets here in the United States."

The CFTC’s proposals, announced on 5 October, address leveraged and margined retail cryptocurrency trading and would introduce a registration category for exchanges offering those products.

The Digital Chamber chief executive Cody Carbone also wrote to House and Senate leaders on Friday, calling for the immediate passage of legislation giving the CFTC authority over cryptocurrency exchanges.

Disagreement over asset-freezing powers

The attack has sharpened debate around the Clarity Act, a broader cryptocurrency market structure bill that passed the House last year but has stalled in the Senate.

Senator Cynthia Lummis, one of the bill’s negotiators, argued that its provisions could help companies respond faster to suspicious transfers.

"Yesterday, hackers stole more than $6 billion from Binance in less than 4 hours, the biggest heist in history," she wrote on X. "The Clarity Act would have given crypto firms legal cover to freeze suspicious transactions the instant law enforcement calls. Every minute lost is money gone for good."

That interpretation drew a challenge from Amanda Fischer, policy director and chief operating officer at Better Markets and a former Securities and Exchange Commission chief of staff.

Fischer said the legislation would require stablecoin issuers to "freeze per a court order", while noting that cryptocurrency firms had already moved quickly to freeze assets following the breach.

Solana Policy Institute general counsel Patrick Wilson disputed her reading, saying a provision in the bill "expressly protected stablecoin issuers from private lawsuits for voluntary, temporary holds based on a reasonable belief of a violation of law. No court order required."

A security crisis becomes a legislative test

Binance was already facing political scrutiny over compliance and customer protection. In 2023, founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to failing to implement adequate anti-money-laundering controls as part of a wider settlement involving the exchange. Trump later pardoned him.

The latest breach adds urgency to the regulatory debate, but the disagreement over the Clarity Act shows that lawmakers and policy specialists remain divided over what new rules would achieve.

For Congress, the challenge is to turn renewed pressure into a framework with clear responsibilities for exchange supervision, customer safeguards and emergency asset freezes.