Exchanges Cover Billion‑Dollar Hacks

Major centralized cryptocurrency exchanges can and sometimes do use large internal reserves, insurance funds, and market purchases to restore user balances after multibillion‑dollar breaches, while relying on stablecoin issuer freezes and law‑enforcement tracing to recover laundered assets. That response creates a private safety net but also concentrates systemic and moral‑hazard risk in a few firms and stablecoin issuers. — This matters because it reframes large exchange hacks from being purely technical outages into systemic governance events that implicate corporate treasuries, market stability, sanctions enforcement, and who ultimately bears loss—users, firms, or governments.