Arbitrum’s Security Council froze 8,425 ETH and 74,559,805.2 ARB tied to the Binance exploit in an emergency action executed at 8:08am HKT on October 30, 2026 The council temporarily upgraded
Arbitrum’s Security Council disclosed an emergency action aimed at the funds flowing out of Binance’s hot wallets during the October 29 exploit, executed at 8:08am Hong Kong time on October 30, 2026. According to the council’s own governance forum post, the action froze 8,425 ETH and 74,559,805.2 ARB that had been identified as linked to the Binance incident on Arbitrum One.
The mechanism involved a single atomic operation carried out on Ethereum. The council temporarily upgraded Arbitrum’s Inbox contract to add a function called sendUnsignedTransactionOverride, which let it act as though it were the exploit-linked sending address. Using that capability, it sent two cross-chain transactions, as that address, that moved the identified funds on Arbitrum One into a holding address. Once the transfer was complete, the council reverted the Inbox contract back to its original implementation, closing the window in which that override existed.
The funds now sit at the address 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000DA0, and the council’s post states they can only be moved from there by a vote of ArbitrumDAO, the network’s governance body. That design means the council cannot unilaterally decide what ultimately happens to the frozen assets; any further disposition, whether returning them to Binance, holding them, or another outcome, would require a governance process rather than a single administrative decision.
Arbitrum contributors prepared the transaction payload in advance, and the Security Council verified it before signing and executing, a process the forum post frames as having moved quickly given the scale of funds involved. The announcement is specific that the action targeted only the identified exploit-linked address and states plainly that no other user’s funds or applications on Arbitrum were affected by the Inbox contract’s temporary upgrade.
This is one of several chain-level and protocol-level responses to the same underlying Binance incident, following freezes carried out separately by stablecoin issuers and lending protocols. The full technical account is posted on Arbitrum’s own governance forum.
This post first appeared in Arbitrum’s Security Council Freezes 8,425 ETH and 74.6 Million ARB Tied to the Binance Exploit
