Arbitrum DAO to vote on Binance’s frozen ETH and ARB

The primary proposal filed by Binance asks the Arbitrum DAO to unlock 8,425.997 ETH$2,260.18▼6.07% and 74,559,805.2 ARB sitting at address 0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000DA0 since the exchange’s October 29 hot-wallet exploit. Binance wants the funds routed to 0xd9fd39103674cb061d64d9c3b73b878dbe610b80 — its proposed recovery address — and applied toward making affected users whole.

The Security Council, a 12-member body elected by ARB holders, froze the assets on October 29. It didn’t wait for the exploiter to cooperate. CoinDesk reported that nine of the 12 members approved an emergency upgrade that temporarily swapped the code of Arbitrum’s Inbox contract, inserting a function calledsendUnsignedTransactionOverride that let the council send transactions from the exploiter’s address without holding the private key.

Zealynx, quoted by CoinDesk, said the council “used powers the DAO gave it and published both actions within an hour and a half,” while flagging that the assumption an address only moves when its key signs holds “up to whoever controls the upgrade path.” The Security Council said, in comments quoted by CoinDesk, that the funds “can only be moved by an ArbitrumDAO Governance vote, which will be coordinated with relevant parties.”

Binance wrote in the filing: “This proposal asks the ArbitrumDAO to approve the release of the 8,425.997 ETH and 74,559,805.2 ARB currently immobilized on Arbitrum One.” The FBI attributed the underlying hack to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group on October 31.

At CoinGecko‘s listed price of $2,251.04 per ETH, the frozen ether comes to approximately $18,967,256 — 8,425.997 × $2,251.04. The ARB portion is excluded from that figure because no current ARB price appears in the proposal materials, so the total mark-to-market value of everything sitting at the holding address remains unknown until one is applied.

The full governance process is expected to run about 49 days, covering forum discussion, a temperature-check vote, an on-chain vote, and transaction execution. Arbitrum is expected to bear no direct budgetary cost beyond normal governance overhead.

In April 2026, the council extracted 30,766 ETH — worth roughly $71 million at the time — from an address tied to the KelpDAO exploit after law enforcement identified the attacker. CoinDesk reported that getting those funds out of the holding address took weeks and ran into legal delays.