Cryptocurrency exchange Binance temporarily suspended its blockchain network after hackers made off with around $570 million worth of its BNB token.
Binance said late Thursday a cross-chain bridge linking with its BNB Chain was targeted, enabling hackers to move BNB tokens off the network. So-called cross-chain bridges are tools that allow the transfer of tokens from one blockchain to another.
The company said it had worked with network validators — entities or individuals who confirm transactions on the blockchain — to pause creation of new blocks on BSC, suspending all transaction processing while a team of developers investigates the breach.
Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume.
“An exploit on a cross-chain bridge, BSC Token Hub, resulted in extra BNB. We have asked all validators to temporarily suspend BSC,” Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s CEO, said in a tweet Thursday evening.
“The issue is contained now. Your funds are safe. We apologize for the inconvenience and will provide further updates accordingly.”
BNB Chain has since resumed operations.
In total, hackers drained 2 million BNB tokens — about $570 million at current prices — from the network, Binance’s BNB Chain said in a blog post on Friday.
The hack was caused by a bug in the bridge’s smart contract that allowed hackers to forge transactions and send money back to their crypto wallet, according to crypto security firm Immunefi. Smart contracts are pieces of code on the blockchain that allow agreements to execute automatically without human intervention.
“As with many bridge designs, there is one central point that holds most of the funds that are moving through the bridge,” Adrian Hetman, tech lead of the triaging team at Immunefi, told CNBC.
“Ultimately, the Bridge was tricked into giving funds from that contract.”
The value of BNB sank more than 3% Friday morning to $285.36 a coin, according to CoinMarketCap data.
An earlier estimate from the company placed the total amount withdrawn in a range of $100 million to $110 million. The company also said it managed to freeze $7 million of funds with the help of its security partners.
A Binance spokesperson told CNBC the company coordinated with BNB Chain validators to enact an upgrade. That meant that most of the funds remained in the exploiter’s crypto wallet, while about $100 million was “unrecovered.”
BNB Chain has 26 active validators at present and 44 in total in different time zones, the spokesperson added.
BNB Chain, originally known as Binance Chain, was first developed by Binance in 2019. Like other blockchains, it features a native token, called BNB, that can be traded or used in games and other applications.
A total of around $1.4 billion has been lost to breaches on cross-chain bridges since the start of 2022, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
The crypto industry has had a rough year, with roughly $2 trillion in value being erased since the peak of a blistering rally from 2020 to 2021. The implosion of $60 billion blockchain venture Terra and a worsening macroeconomic environment have severely impacted market sentiment.
Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk appears on a media tour of the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, on Sept. 23, 2025.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Oracle on Friday pushed back against a report that said the company will complete data centers for OpenAI, one of its major customers, in 2028, rather than 2027.
The delay is due to a shortage of labor and materials, according to the Friday report from Bloomberg, which cited unnamed people. Oracle shares fell to a session low of $185.98, down 6.5% from Thursday’s close.
“Site selection and delivery timelines were established in close coordination with OpenAI following execution of the agreement and were jointly agreed,” an Oracle spokesperson said in an email to CNBC. “There have been no delays to any sites required to meet our contractual commitments, and all milestones remain on track.”
The Oracle spokesperson did not specify a timeline for turning on cloud computing infrastructure for OpenAI. In September, OpenAI said it had a partnership with Oracle worth more than $300 billion over the next five years.
“We have a good relationship with OpenAI,” Clay Magouyrk, one of Oracle’s two newly appointed CEOs, said at an October analyst meeting.
Doing business with OpenAI is relatively new to 48-year-old Oracle. Historically, Oracle grew through sales of its database software and business applications. Its cloud infrastructure business now contributes over one-fourth of revenue, although Oracle remains a smaller hyperscaler than Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
OpenAI has also made commitments to other companies as it looks to meet expected capacity needs.
In September, Nvidia said it had signed a letter of intent with OpenAI to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia equipment for the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup. The first phase of that project is expected in the second half of 2026.
Nvidia and OpenAI said in a September statement that they “look forward to finalizing the details of this new phase of strategic partnership in the coming weeks.”
But no announcement has come yet.
In a November filing, Nvidia said “there is no assurance that we will enter into definitive agreements with respect to the OpenAI opportunity.”
OpenAI has historically relied on Nvidia graphics processing units to operate ChatGPT and other products, and now it’s also looking at designing custom chips in a collaboration with Broadcom.
On Thursday, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan laid out a timeline for the OpenAI work, which was announced in October. Broadcom and OpenAI said they had signed a term sheet.
“It’s more like 2027, 2028, 2029, 10 gigawatts, that was the OpenAI discussion,” Tan said on Broadcom’s earnings call. “And that’s, I call it, an agreement, an alignment of where we’re headed with respect to a very respected and valued customer, OpenAI. But we do not expect much in 2026.”
“This is the wrong approach — and most likely illegal,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said in a post on X Thursday.
“We need a strong federal safety standard, but we should not remove the few protections Americans currently have from the downsides of AI,” Klobuchar said.
Trump’s executive order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create a task force to challenge state laws regulating AI.
The Commerce Department was also directed to identify “onerous” state regulations aimed at AI.
The order is a win for tech companies such as OpenAI and Google and the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, which have all lobbied against state regulations they view as burdensome.
It follows a push by some Republicans in Congress to impose a moratorium on state AI laws. A recent plan to tack on that moratorium to the National Defense Authorization Act was scuttled.
Collin McCune, head of government affairs at Andreessen Horowitz, celebrated Trump’s order, calling it “an important first step” to boost American competition and innovation. But McCune urged Congress to codify a national AI framework.
“States have an important role in addressing harms and protecting people, but they can’t provide the long-term clarity or national direction that only Congress can deliver,” McCune said in a statement.
Sriram Krishnan, a White House AI advisor and former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, during an interview Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” said that Trump is was looking to partner with Congress to pass such legislation.
“The White House is now taking a firm stance where we want to push back on ‘doomer’ laws that exist in a bunch of states around the country,” Krishnan said.
He also said that the goal of the executive order is to give the White House tools to go after state laws that it believes make America less competitive, such as recently passed legislation in Democratic-led states like California and Colorado.
The White House will not use the executive order to target state laws that protect the safety of children, Krishnan said.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, called Trump’s order “mostly bluster” and said the president “cannot unilaterally preempt state law.”
“We expect the EO to be challenged in court and defeated,” Weissman said in a statement. “In the meantime, states should continue their efforts to protect their residents from the mounting dangers of unregulated AI.”
Weissman said about the order, “This reward to Big Tech is a disgraceful invitation to reckless behavior by the world’s largest corporations and a complete override of the federalist principles that Trump and MAGA claim to venerate.”
In the short term, the order could affect a handful of states that have already passed legislation targeting AI. The order says that states whose laws are considered onerous could lose federal funding.
One Colorado law, set to take effect in June, will require AI developers to protect consumers from reasonably foreseeable risks of algorithmic discrimination.
Some say Trump’s order will have no real impact on that law or other state regulations.
“I’m pretty much ignoring it, because an executive order cannot tell a state what to do,” said Colorado state Rep. Brianna Titone, a Democrat who co-sponsored the anti-discrimination law.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a law that, starting in January, will require major AI companies to publicly disclose their safety protocols.
That law’s author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, said that Trump’s stated goal of having the United States dominate the AI sector is undercut by his recent moves.
“Of course, he just authorized chip sales to China & Saudi Arabia: the exact opposite of ensuring U.S. dominance,” Wiener wrote in an X post on Thursday night. The Bay Area Democrat is seeking to succeed Speaker-emerita Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Trump on Monday said he will Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips to “approved customers” in China, provided that U.S. gets a 25% cut of revenues.
Coinbase is gearing up to launch an in-house prediction market, powered by Kalshi, a source close to the matter told CNBC — a strategic play to expand the number of asset classes available on the cryptocurrency exchange at a time some investors are shying away from digital assets.
The source said Coinbase and Kalshi will “soon” formally announce the prediction market, with news on the matter potentially coming as early as next week.
Rumblings of the prediction market launch have swirled for nearly a month. An alleged screenshot of Coinbase’s prediction markets dashboard shared by Silicon Valley researcher Jane Manchun Wong in an X post dated Nov. 18 offered some clues about the new product.
The Information first reported on Nov. 19 that Coinbase planned to launch prediction markets powered by Kalshi, adding that the exchange would unveil the new product at its “Coinbase System Update” event on Dec. 17. Bloomberg published a similar report on Thursday, citing a source familiar with the matter, adding that Coinbase would also announce a tokenized stock offering at the showcase.
Coinbase declined to confirm the reports to CNBC, but said to tune into its event next week. The firm did not comment on a timeline for when its prediction markets would go live for its users.
Coinbase’s upcoming product launches underscore its push to refashion itself into an “everything exchange,” or a one-stop shop for trading all kinds of assets, including crypto tokens, tokenized stocks and event contracts. In May, CEO Brian Armstrong articulated that “everything exchange” vision to investors, saying Coinbase would aim to become a top financial services app within the next decade.
The trading platform is setting its sights on that goal as it faces intensifying competition from rivals such as Robinhood,Gemini and Kraken. All three have launched tokenized equity offerings to users outside of the U.S. within the past year, in addition to exploring prediction markets to varying extents.
Coinbase’s moves to expand the financial instruments available to its users also come as investor sentiment on digital assets cools. A series of liquidations of highly leveraged digital asset positions in mid-October triggered several pullbacks in the crypto market, prompting investors to rotate out of tokens and into gold and other safe-have assets.
Bitcoin fell as low as around $85,000 in early December, hitting its lowest level since last March. The token was last trading at $89,951, down 23% in the past three months. Coinbase has also fallen more than 16% over the past three months.
The deal also underscores U.S.-based prediction markets operator Kalshi’s push to embed its event contracts into various brokerages, widening its reach as the prediction markets space becomes increasingly competitive.
This year, Kalshi embedded several of its prediction markets into trading platform Robinhood, as part of a non-exclusive partnership between the companies. Kalshi has also engaged in talks with several other major brokerages, including those in the crypto industry, with the aim of closing more deals like the ones it has struck with Robinhood and now Coinbase, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC.