4 min read

Happy Friday!

Hackers emptied $6.3 billion out of Binance in about 20 minutes on Thursday night, in what is thought to be the biggest crypto hack ever. Google has put a small data centre into orbit and asked it for a haiku, and a British insurer will now cover your humanoid robot if it damages your home.

Most of the $6.3 billion stolen from Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, left its wallets in about 20 minutes from 20:05 GMT on Thursday, one expert told the BBC. It is thought to be the biggest crypto hack on record, more than four times the $1.5 billion taken from the rival exchange Bybit last year.

Binance says the attack may have started with a compromised laptop belonging to one of its DevOps engineers, which gave the attacker access to a service container used to submit withdrawals. Co-chief executive Richard Teng has since said more than one person was involved, and that the hackers abused an Ethereum feature called EIP-7702 to take control of a hot wallet without passing through the company's normal approval controls. They also used a “self-destruct mechanism” that wiped their tools and traces as they went.

TRM Labs says it has “high confidence” that North Korea's TraderTraitor group, also known as Lazarus, carried out the theft, and Chainalysis also points to North Korea, which has always denied involvement in such attacks. Around $3 billion has been frozen so far, and Binance says it will cover every loss from its emergency fund and its own money. Withdrawals stay switched off while the service is rebuilt, and Teng hopes to restore them within 40 hours.

Binance can find $6.3 billion to cover the loss without asking customers for a penny, which says a lot about how much it makes. It says much less for security that let one engineer's laptop lead to a hot wallet emptied in 20 minutes.

Lucas

The first job Google gave its new space data centre was to write a haiku about being in space. The prototype satellite, part of a project called Suncatcher, launched earlier this month on a SpaceX Falcon 9 alongside more than 100 other spacecraft. After about three weeks of checks, engineers sent their first prompt this week to Gemma 4, the Google DeepMind model loaded onboard, and it replied: “Blue marble below / Data streams in silent grace / Starlight feeds my core.”

The satellite carries four of Google's tensor processing units, or TPUs, and generates up to 1 kW of electricity. That is only enough to run one chip at a time, for about 20 minutes, which makes the already tricky job of talking to the ground harder still. The tests now under way will show how the chips cope with heat and with radiation, which can flip bits in memory and corrupt data without tripping the usual monitoring tools.

If the chip holds up, Google plans to launch two more satellites in 2027 with more power and optical links between them. Suncatcher is designed to make computing in orbit economical in the 2030s, and that depends on SpaceX's Starship becoming fully and rapidly reusable. Google's own researchers estimated this month that Starship would need to fly 1,800 times to match the cost reductions SpaceX achieved with its earlier rockets.

Google has put four AI chips into orbit with enough power to run one for about 20 minutes, and spent the first session on a haiku. The plan needs Starship to fly 1,800 times, so the poem is its most finished part.

Callum

British homeowners can now insure a humanoid robot against damaging their house, well before most of them are likely to own one. Specialist insurer Adrian Flux has added what it calls the UK's first domestic humanoid robot policy to its home insurance range, underwritten by Texas-based Tokio Marine HCC, and the two firms expect robots to start appearing in UK homes from 2027.

The policy covers damage to the robot and its theft, along with anything it breaks in the home. It also includes personal liability if the machine injures someone or damages their property, and pays for emergency recovery or a safe shutdown after a sudden malfunction. In the US, where home humanoids are already on sale, early models cost around $20,000.

“As robots start to arrive in people's homes, we wanted to provide clarity on who is responsible if something goes wrong,” said Gerry Bucke, general manager at Adrian Flux. The firm launched a driverless car policy in 2016 and says this one will be updated in the same way as the technology and its risks change.

The safe shutdown cover matters most, because no repair claim fixes a $20,000 machine that refuses to stop.

Lucas