Binance Seeks Return of 8,425.997 Ethereum (ETH) Frozen on Arbitrum

Binance Seeks 8,425.997 ETH Return

Binance has filed a governance proposal with Arbitrum's DAO asking for the return of 8,425.997 Ethereum (ETH) and 74,559,805.2 ARB frozen on the Layer 2 network after last month's hot wallet exploit at the exchange. The filing landed on Thursday, Nov. 5, the same day the Ethereum price fell 7.1% over the past 24 hours. The assets sit at an intermediary frozen address and can only move through an onchain vote, so the proposal asks tokenholders to authorize a transfer to Binance's designated recovery address rather than a fresh treasury allocation.

The freeze dates to Oct. 30, when Arbitrum's Security Council ran an emergency action at 8:08 a.m. Hong Kong time: it temporarily upgraded the rollup's Inbox smart contract on the Ethereum network, moved balances from the address tied to the breach into the frozen address, then restored the original implementation. Its notice confirmed no other users' funds or applications were affected. Binance's recovery would run the same sequence in reverse, at no direct cost to the DAO budget beyond normal governance execution.

Recovered assets would go toward incident-related losses and costs, including replenishing SAFU, the Secure Asset Fund for Users, and company reserves already spent compensating customers. Binance's incident disclosure had estimated compromised assets at roughly $6.3 billion, with about $3 billion frozen onchain at the time. The draft also builds in legal guardrails: submission and delivery pause while any restraining notice, writ or court order blocks the transfer, and Binance must first sign indemnification agreements covering the Arbitrum (ARB) Foundation, Offchain Labs and Security Council members under New York law. The Security Council's own notice listed the frozen amount as 8,425 ETH, one decimal short of the 8,425.997 Binance requests, while both documents state the ARB figure identically. The schedule Binance outlines allocates one week to forum discussion, a weeklong temperature check, a two-week onchain vote and roughly 18 further days for execution after approval, and the exchange projects the full procedure at about 49 days, longer if legal questions stay unresolved.

Withdrawals Reopen on Six Networks

Alongside the DAO filing, Binance published its eighth recovery update, scheduling withdrawals for additional assets to reopen progressively from 04:00 UTC on Nov. 5. The list covers selected assets on Ethereum (ETH), BSC, Base, Tron, Polygon and Sui, and each asset and network combination comes back only after it passes security and readiness checks. Deposits have remained open throughout the incident. The exchange said it ranks tokens by demand recorded over the preceding week and warned that heavy traffic could cause temporary delays. The staged approach extends a pattern from earlier in the recovery, when the third withdrawal wave reopened outflows for 36 Ethereum network tokens. The update names no endpoint: Binance has not said which assets or networks come next, leaving the pace of remaining reopenings dependent on the security checks themselves.

A second announcement the same day said Binance removed all API keys linked to SignalPlus after the third-party trading platform reported a potential security issue. The exchange stated that its own systems were unaffected and that user funds remained safe. SignalPlus users were told to review positions and open orders directly through Binance, wait for confirmation that the issue is resolved before reconnecting keys, and enable IP whitelisting in the meantime. The removal cuts an outside connection to exchange accounts while withdrawal capacity is still being rebuilt, and Binance has presented both steps as parts of one recovery sequence.

A 49-Day Vote Path, Measured Against Quorum

The deeper shift here is procedural: recovering assets on a major Layer 2 now runs through constitutional governance rather than exchange discretion. Arbitrum's constitution requires at least 1 million delegated Arbitrum (ARB) to submit a proposal, a three-day waiting period before a 14-day vote, and participation of half of delegated votable tokens, bounded between a 150 million minimum and a 450 million maximum. Those thresholds, not the forum thread, decide the outcome. The market backdrop sharpens the stakes: the 7.1% dip over the past 24 hours, weakness across the altcoin market and the recent rejection at the $2.5K supply zone leave the price sensitive while a process Binance itself pegs at 49 days plays out. Our Ethereum technical analysis tracks how the levels resolve while the ballot runs.