Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has offered an explanation for why ADA was not among the assets drained during the massive $6.3 billion Binance hack on October 29.

Speaking about the incident, Hoskinson argued that Cardano’s wallet and transaction architecture made ADA harder to steal through the attack path used against Binance.

“The reason why ADA wasn’t stolen was that our wallet design and how people transact on Cardano is fundamentally different from an account-based system,” Hoskinson said in a clip shared by Cardanians.

He added that Cardano “designed things correctly” and connected those security decisions with the rise of increasingly sophisticated AI-assisted attacks.

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Hoskinson Points to Cardano’s eUTXO Model

The key difference Hoskinson is referring to is Cardano’s Extended Unspent Transaction Output, or eUTXO, model.

Unlike an account-based blockchain such as Ethereum, where an address maintains a mutable balance, Cardano represents assets as individual transaction outputs. Spending ADA requires specific UTXOs to be consumed and new outputs to be created.

Cardano’s developer documentation says this makes transactions deterministic: their inputs and effects can be evaluated before submission, and scripts validate proposed transactions instead of independently modifying shared account state.

This can reduce certain classes of smart-contract and authorization risk.

But there is an important distinction.

Charles Hoskinson on the $6.3B Binance hack: "The reason why ADA wasn’t stolen was that our wallet design and how people transact on Cardano is fundamentally different from an account-based system" "We weren’t part of it, because we designed things correctly, we predicted the AI revolution."

There is currently no public Binance postmortem establishing that Cardano’s eUTXO design was specifically what prevented ADA from being stolen.

Hoskinson is giving his technical interpretation of why Cardano was not affected in the same way.

Binance Attack Hit Multiple Blockchains

The October 29 attack was much broader than a single Ethereum exploit.

Binance says approximately $6.34 billion in assets were affected after attackers compromised its hot-wallet infrastructure. The exchange said its investigation found multiple points of breach and, importantly, no evidence that wallet private keys themselves were leaked.

The FBI subsequently attributed the theft to North Korea’s TraderTraitor operation.

Funds moved from Binance wallets across numerous blockchains. Public analysis identified stolen BTC, ETH, stablecoins and XRP, among other assets. On Ethereum specifically, one major drain involved signed EIP-7702 authorizations that allowed attacker-controlled code to sweep assets from a Binance hot wallet.

That wider context means it would be too simple to conclude that account-based blockchains were vulnerable while UTXO-based chains were automatically safe.

Bitcoin also uses a UTXO model, for example, yet BTC was stolen in the incident.

Read also: Claude AI Predicts Cardano (ADA) Price as Bitcoin Crash Targets $60K

Cardano’s Security Argument Is Still Interesting

That does not make Hoskinson’s point irrelevant.

How an exchange constructs ADA transactions, separates signing authority and applies additional spending conditions can materially affect what an attacker is able to do after compromising internal infrastructure.

Cardano’s eUTXO model also allows spending conditions to be attached to specific outputs instead of granting broad control over an entire mutable account.

What the Binance attack demonstrated, however, is that blockchain architecture is only one layer of exchange security.

The attackers appear to have compromised Binance’s internal systems and authorization process rather than breaking the underlying blockchains themselves.

Binance has since rebuilt the affected wallet system, replaced compromised devices and credentials, strengthened access controls and increased investment in AI-based security monitoring.

ADA’s absence from the stolen assets is therefore notable, and Hoskinson believes Cardano’s design deserves credit.

But until Binance publishes more detailed technical findings about how individual wallets and chains were protected or compromised, that remains an argument from the Cardano founder rather than a confirmed conclusion from the investigation.

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