The theft of $6.3bn from Binance this week put a great deal of specialist vocabulary on front pages that do not normally carry it. Most of the terms are simpler than they sound.
The words
Cryptocurrency — a digital token whose ownership is recorded on a shared ledger rather than by a bank. No central institution issues it or guarantees it.
Bitcoin — the first and best known of them, created in 2009 by someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, whose real identity is still unknown. Because nobody controls it, its price moves entirely on what buyers and sellers will pay: it passed $100,000 in December 2024, reached about $126,000 in October 2025, and fell below $65,000 in early 2026.
Blockchain — the technology underneath. Think of a shared spreadsheet on which every transaction is written, arranged in blocks, each block referring to the one before it. Anyone can read it, which is why stolen funds can be traced.
Exchange — a company, like Binance, where you swap ordinary money for tokens and back. It is the part of the system that looks and behaves like a bank, and the part that gets robbed.
Hot and cold wallet — a hot wallet is connected to the internet so funds can move quickly; a cold wallet is kept offline. Exchanges keep a working balance hot, which is the balance an attacker goes for. This week’s theft reached the signing system behind a hot wallet.
Stablecoin — a token pegged to a real currency, usually the dollar, and issued by a company such as Tether or Circle. Because an issuer controls the ledger, it can freeze tokens. That is how about $2.3bn of this week’s theft was stopped, and why none of the Bitcoin was.
Where Bangladeshi readers actually stand
This is the part no international explainer will tell you. Trading cryptocurrency is not legal here. Bangladesh Bank has issued warnings since 2014, and the instrument it relies on is the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act: moving value out of the country outside the banking channel is an offence, and a crypto purchase is exactly that. There is no licensed exchange, no investor protection and no regulator to appeal to.
Despite that, holding is common. A large informal market runs peer-to-peer, usually settled through mobile financial services, and some freelancers park earnings in stablecoins rather than bringing them home through the remittance system — which is itself an offence, and which also forfeits the 2.5% government incentive paid on remittance received through legal channels.
Three things worth knowing before anyone decides
You carry the whole loss. Binance is covering its customers this week because it chose to. There is no deposit insurance and, for a Bangladeshi account, no authority that would even take the complaint.
The peg is a promise, not a law of nature. A stablecoin is worth a dollar because a company says it holds a dollar. Several have broken that promise before.
Traceable is not reversible. Every transaction being public sounds like security. It is not: investigators can watch stolen money move and still be unable to stop it.
