After the Binance hack, Trump says “we don’t know” and Washington fights over a stalled bill

President Donald Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday 30 October that the US does not yet know whether North Korea was behind the Binance hack. “We don’t know,” he said, adding “We’re looking at that”, according to The Hill. The same day, the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Michael Selig, said the theft “proves our exact point” about the crypto rules his agency floated this month, CNBC reports.

That is where Washington stands two days after about $6.3 billion in client assets was taken from Binance. No agency has publicly named a culprit. We found no executive action. The bill now being argued over has not moved since 15 September, and it has no vote scheduled that we could find.

Trump on the Binance hack: what he said, and how we know

Our sourcing here is thinner than the story deserves. We found no official White House transcript and no video of the exchange, so every Trump line in this article comes from press reports, and they do not all match in wording.

The fullest English record we could read is The Hill’s, carried by Yahoo. Besides the answer on North Korea, it quotes him on Binance: “They say they have it pretty much under control,” then “We’ll see.” The Block describes a Friday afternoon press conference and does not name the room.

South Korea’s SBS News has a different form of the same answers. Its text reads “We don’t know, we are looking into it”, and on the stolen funds, “They say they’re going to get it back.” SBS warns that its English was translated by AI and may contain errors, so those two lines may not be his exact words.

He also made a wider point about crypto. “It’s a hack. That’s the problem,” he said in The Hill’s version, before mentioning “the old-fashioned way when you used to sign a check” and saying “these are different people, never see the money anymore”. The reported fragments do not show exactly how the comparison ran. “So I’ve always felt it was a little bit dangerous,” he added. Bloomberg ran a headline saying the hack was under US review for possible North Korean involvement, but its article was behind a paywall and we could not read it.

None of these reports names a lead agency. The FBI said it was working with “relevant public and private partners”, according to CNBC, and it did not attribute the intrusion to North Korea, according to Nextgov as relayed by Coindoo. SBS says the FBI and the Secret Service have opened investigations.

North Korea remains a suspect, not a finding. Chainalysis told CNBC the attack appears to be the work of TraderTraitor, a suspected North Korean hacking group, and TRM Labs said several features match earlier heists linked to the country. Those are private assessments that no US authority has confirmed, and Reuters reports that North Korea denies involvement. SBS adds that a confirmed role could hurt any restart of talks between Washington and Pyongyang.

CFTC chair Selig blames offshore exchanges, but his rulebook is optional

Selig has the most developed argument in town. In a Friday CNBC interview relayed by Decrypt, he said “these are unregulated offshore exchanges” and that the weakness was “introduced from someone’s laptop”. He stressed that the blockchain itself was not broken. His remedy is what he calls a “federal option”: offshore venues could register with the CFTC and meet the cybersecurity standards that apply to US markets.

The laptop account may already be incomplete. Binance first pointed to a compromised engineer’s machine, but co-CEO Richard Teng later described “a more complex process rather than the misuse of a single engineer’s permissions”, CNBC reports, and Binance has since reported additional points of breach.

Selig also claimed an upside. On-chain tracing, he said, gives regulators “a lot of potential to be really cop on the beat here”, though he conceded that speed and tools such as Tornado Cash make crypto harder to police.

His case has a gap, and he has described it himself. Press reports speak of rules the CFTC “proposed”, but what the agency issued is a step earlier: an advance notice of proposed rulemaking, announced on 5 October and printed in the Federal Register on 13 October, covering two planned regimes, Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets. It sets out preliminary views and questions, and it contains no rule text. The CFTC says the comments will inform possible future rulemaking. Our piece on the retail crypto consultation has the detail. The notice’s voting summary records one vote, Selig’s.

The plan is also narrower than Friday’s language suggests. It covers retail crypto trades offered with leverage, margin or financing, and an exchange listing only those products “could elect” to become a CFTC-registered crypto asset market. The Block reported on 5 October that crypto would not have to trade on CFTC-registered platforms without action by Congress, and quoted Selig: “We don’t have the authority to impose such a requirement without congressional action.” On cybersecurity, the notice asks what operational safeguards should apply. It sets no standard yet.

So an exchange that declined the federal option would stay where it is. Nothing Selig said in the reports we read explains how an elective register would draw in a venue that prefers to stay out, or whether its standards would have stopped this attack, whose full sequence Binance has not yet published.

CLARITY Act and Binance: would the bill have sped up the freezes?

The sharpest exchange took place on X on Friday, and it turns on a narrow legal point. Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican and one of the bill’s negotiators, wrote that the CLARITY Act would have given crypto firms legal cover to freeze suspicious transactions as soon as law enforcement called. “Every minute lost is money gone for good,” she said, according to The Block.

Amanda Fischer, chief operating officer and policy director of the advocacy group Better Markets, pushed back. The bill would have required stablecoin issuers to “freeze per a court order”, she said in The Block’s account, and TokenPost reports her view that it would not have prevented the hack in any case. TokenPost, however, attaches her court-order point to the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law signed on 18 July 2025. Her original post was not available to us, so we went to the texts.

They favour The Block’s version. Section 305(c) of H.R. 3633 as reported to the Senate in June says permitted stablecoin issuers “shall comply” with freeze orders from a court of competent jurisdiction. The GENIUS Act’s “lawful order” is wider, covering both courts and authorized federal agencies, so a courts-only reading does not describe that law. The same wording appears in Section 10305 of a longer Senate substitute on Lummis’s website. Republicans posted a further text before the September vote, and we have not compared that one.

Lummis answered directly. “What you fail to understand about the Clarity Act is that it would classify Binance as a covered person,” she wrote in a reply reported by Gokhshtein Media, adding: “Your party voted no, and you have to own that.” She called the passage Fischer relied on a “savings clause”, one that keeps existing finance and sanctions law in force without cancelling the rest of the section. We read those posts in press reports and did not open them on X.

Section 305 does list digital asset service providers as covered persons. The term comes from the GENIUS Act, which limits it to people doing that business in the United States, including on behalf of US customers. The section also preserves freezes made under a lawful order or sanctions designation, which fits her description, though we have not seen which passage Fischer cited.

Patrick Wilson, general counsel at the Solana Policy Institute, sided with Lummis. He said the bill “expressly protected stablecoin issuers from private lawsuits for voluntary, temporary holds”, and added: “No court order required.” The text bears that out. A covered person acting in good faith is shielded if it has a reasonable belief that a transaction relates to a violation of law, or if it receives a qualified written request from a law enforcement agency. A hold can last up to 30 days, plus 150 more on such a request.

Each side has hold of part of Section 305: a duty to obey court orders in subsection (c), a voluntary shield in subsection (b). Subsection (d) adds that nothing in the section compels a firm to freeze anything existing law does not already require. A shield for voluntary holds would not by itself have stopped anyone taking money from a hot wallet. Lummis concedes as much: “No law stops every bad actor.” Her claim is about speed.

The Senate vote that left the bill stuck at 49 to 50

The vote Lummis means took place on Tuesday 15 September, when a motion to end debate on taking up H.R. 3633 failed 49 to 50, 11 short of the 60 required, according to Bitcoin.com News. All 49 yes votes came from Republicans, and no Democrat backed it. Four Republicans voted no: Bitcoin.com names Susan Collins, Josh Hawley, Jerry Moran and Thom Tillis, and the law firm Orrick says Tillis did so to be able to enter a motion to reconsider.

The House had been far less divided. It passed the bill on 17 July 2025 by 294 to 134, with 78 Democrats in favour, the Clerk’s roll call shows.

The Senate fight was over ethics. CNBC reported the day before the vote that Republican leaders had offered language barring the president and other senior officials from issuing digital assets, and that Senator Elizabeth Warren would call it a “weak fig leaf”. For the regulators’ next moves, see our account of how the SEC and CFTC are writing rules without the bill.

The bill is not dead. It stays on the Senate calendar, and Majority Leader John Thune could file another motion to end debate. But floor time is short, and if it is not finished before the 119th Congress ends in January 2027, the process starts over.

Lobbyists ask for a smaller bill while Democrats stay quiet on the hack

The industry is already adjusting its request. The Digital Chamber, a trade group, wrote to congressional leaders on Friday asking for action before this Congress ends. The Block says the letter seeks CFTC authority over crypto exchanges and separation of customer and company funds in bankruptcy. Crypto Economy adds inspection powers over spot platforms and security measures such as “multi-party authorization for withdrawals and real-time monitoring”, and CoinGabbar says it points to the Senate Agriculture Committee’s Digital Commodity Intermediaries Act as a possible base. “Regulators can only act after the damage is done,” chief executive Cody Carbone wrote, The Block reports.

Representative William Timmons, a South Carolina Republican, framed the theft as a security matter. “America cannot allow rogue regimes to exploit digital assets to finance their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs,” he wrote on X, according to The Block.

We found no statement on the hack from Warren or any other Democratic senator, none from Senate Banking Committee chair Tim Scott, and no Senate hearing on the calendar. Fischer, who works for an advocacy group, is the most visible critic we found. Those absences may not last, and they reflect what we could find by Saturday morning.

Stablecoin freezes held billions, and lawyers say that is only step one

The Washington argument matters because freezing is what actually limited the damage. CoinDesk counts more than $1.56 billion in USDT frozen by Tether and about $823 million in USDC by Circle. Ripple and World Liberty Financial also froze assets, in undisclosed amounts. Binance’s own tally is about $3 billion frozen overall. Roughly $1.4 billion in stolen bitcoin, split across 19 wallets, sits outside that reach, because the network has no issuer to freeze it. Exchanges can block those coins only if they arrive on their platforms.

Much of the disagreement in CoinDesk’s report is over who gets this treatment. Anton Golub of Forte backs the response but said: “I see a double standard here.” He pointed to the criticism Circle faced after the Drift hack of roughly $290 million in April. Frank Hepworth of New Market Trading warned that issuers are “setting themselves up for liability if they freeze wrongly”.

Getting money back is a separate problem. “A freeze does not in itself determine who is entitled to the assets,” said Max Atallah of Nordic Law. Irina Heaver of NEOSLegal called it “only the first step”, and Alexander Shirtcliff of Edwin Coe said recovery could need court orders in several jurisdictions. That is the practical test of the “get it back” line SBS attributes to Trump, at least for the frozen tokens.

Stefan Muehlbauer of CertiK brought the debate back to Congress. Clearer legal standards and protection for good-faith freezes would help smaller victims, he said: “The goal should be to make that response the norm for every victim.” That is close to what Lummis and Wilson say the bill offers, and Fischer disputes how far it goes.

What changes for US crypto users, and the next dates

For now, nothing. No rule, bill or executive order has changed as a result of the hack. Designation under the CFTC plan would be elective, unless Congress says otherwise, and the plan is not yet a rule. Selig’s phrase was “unregulated offshore exchanges”; Binance, for its part, announced in December 2025 that Abu Dhabi’s financial regulator had authorised entities behind Binance.com.

Anyone can weigh in on the CFTC side. Comments on the notice are due by 14 December 2026, and Selig has now given commenters a live example to argue about.

A cloture vote, the kind that failed in September, is the Senate’s way to end debate, and it needs 60 votes. An advance notice comes before a proposed rule: it asks questions and binds nobody.

The nearer dates belong to Binance. Its second incident update, signed by co-CEOs Yi He and Richard Teng, targets a phased restart of withdrawals within about 34 hours of Friday’s post, subject to security checks, with proof-of-reserves results by Monday 2 November, Bitcoin.com News reports. In Washington, the next thing to watch is whether the bill comes back in a post-election session, a route Bitcoin.com calls a long shot, and whether any US agency puts its name to the North Korea attribution.