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EN Emily Nicolle On Bloomberg Intelligence

“Some of the patterns that we're seeing in how those funds are being laundered so far match what the DPRK has done in the past. … The funds have been moving through these particular mixing platforms that help obscure the transaction paths, make it harder for you to follow the tokens through the blockchain ledgers.”

Bloomberg Intelligence · October 2026

“Some of the patterns that we're seeing in how those funds are being laundered so far match what the DPRK has done in the past. … The funds have been moving through these particular mixing platforms that help obscure the transaction paths, make it harder for you to follow the tokens through the blockchain ledgers.” — Emily Nicolle, Bloomberg Intelligence

Context

Asked how analysts know North Korea was behind the reported Binance theft, the Bloomberg digital finance reporter explains that the laundering behavior fits earlier North Korean hacks. She says analytics firms attribute it with some confidence, not certainty.

Transcript

Bloomberg Intelligence Around 20:05 into the episode
Paul Sweeney

It does, actually, given the magnitude here. I've seen in the Bloomberg reporting blockchain intelligence firms have pointed to North Korea as behind the Binance heist.

Speaker 6

What do we know there?

Emily Nicolle

So several blockchain analytics firms have already kind of done the work on trying to mapping how the money moved after it left Binance. And the way that they look at that, it kind of tells us whether or not this might have been North Korea. And what they can say is that some of the patterns that we're seeing and how those funds are being laundered so far match what the DPRK has done in the past. And so they're able to kind of say with a degree of confidence that this is North Korea behind it. They can say, you know, oh, well, the funds have been moving through these particular mixing platforms that help kind of obscure the transaction paths, make it harder for you to follow the tokens through the blockchain ledgers. And they can say, you know, they're doing a certain amount of automation as well, moving funds automatically back and forth to certain wallets to try and make it harder to follow as well. So all of that is kind of painting a picture that North Korea was behind this.

Scarlet Fu

And this isn't the first time the North Koreans have been behind some crypto hacks as well. It really raises questions over how secure owning Bitcoin is. Does this discourage new entrants from coming into this market?

Emily Nicolle

It obviously, every time this happens, it does discourage new entrants. I mean, nobody likes to buy something that they don't think is safe. But from the people I've been speaking to today, it seems kind of a bit of like, well, this is just kind of what you get with crypto, right? Like we're in a…

Paul Sweeney

Emily, just 30 seconds left here. What are we seeing with funds flows to crypto ETFs?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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