Last month, hackers who were likely working on behalf of North Korea absconded with billions in stolen cryptocurrency after breaking into Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Now, according to the crypto research firm Elliptic, Pyongyang is using meme coins to launder the hijacked funds.
The Binance heist is the biggest in crypto history, with hackers making off with $6.3 billion in crypto coins in just 20 minutes after months of complex planning.
As outlined in a blog post, Elliptic found that the isolated authoritarian nation is now minting meme coins — speculative digital assets often based on viral memes, celebrities, or niche internet jokes — and using them to quietly move stolen coins around liquidity pools. The coins are designed to be single-use and are fundamentally worthless, yet their creators can still set their price, making them what Elliptic calls a perfect “container” to pass pilfered crypto assets around. It’s also cost-effective, as meme coins are cheap to make.
“Most people think of meme tokens as joke coins whose prices rise and fall on hype,” Elliptic cofounder and chief scientist Tom Robinson wrote in the firm’s blog post. “North Korea’s launderers have found a different use for them, creating tokens that nobody else wants to buy and using them to disguise the movement of stolen funds.”
Elliptic found at least six meme coins believed to be connected to the scheme, each of which was created shortly after the $6.3 billion heist occurred. The hackers have reportedly been able to launder around $430,000 of their multibillion-dollar heist using this method.
To North Korea’s credit, the coins do look extremely dumb and worthless. One of them carries an image of sometimes-trillionaire Elon Musk under an “Elon 2028 President” banner, per Elliptic. (There’s no evidence that Musk is involved in the scheme.) Others feature a monkey with a pink hair bow and a weird duck in front of an American flag. One is simply called “FUK.”
“Meme coins are launched and traded in their thousands, and most fade within days, so one more short-lived token with a cartoon logo attracts little attention,” Robinson wrote. “A wallet whose history shows trades in a new meme coin looks like a speculator rather than a launderer, unless someone checks where its money came from.”
This isn’t the first time that North Korea has used a similar strategy. Last year, after the same group of North Korean hackers stole $1.5 billion from the crypto exchange Bybit, Elliptic found that the cybercriminals moved at least $24 million from the billion-dollar haul using meme coins.
More on the Binance hack: It Turns Out Binance’s $6 Billion Hack Happened Because Its Employees Were Vibe Coding