Onchain data and transaction tracking platform Arkham uncovered the largest ever Bitcoin heist of $3.5 billion. This high-profile case involves the once-biggest Chinese mining pool LuBian, which silently asked hackers to return funds. Arkham also shared that neither party acknowledged the hack publicly.
In an X post on August 3, Arkham stated that a staggering amount of 127,426 BTC was stolen from LuBian in December 2020, worth $3.5 billion at the time and now worth over $14.5 billion.
Being one of the largest mining pools, LuBian was controlling nearly 6% of Bitcoin’s total hash-rate in May 2020. Onchain findings showed that the pool was drained for over 90% of its total funds in December 2020.
“They appear to have been first hacked on December 28th, 2020 for over 90% of their BTC,” Arkham shared, adding that approximately $6 million of additional BTC and USDT was stolen from another Lubian-related address active on the Bitcoin Omni layer on December 29. While on December 31, LuBian rotated their remaining funds to recovery wallets.
Hacker Asked to Return Funds
Arkham noted that LuBian used over 1.4 BTC to send on-chain messages using OP_RETURN code and asked hackers to return funds in a sum of over 1,516 transactions. However, none of the messages seem to have received replies.
DeFi protocols and crypto companies follow a standard practice of offering 10% white-hat bounties to hackers in exchange for returning stolen funds. While the hacker address still holds the stolen BTC, LuBian asked in a July 2024 transaction to return funds in an optimistic white-hat approach. “MSG from LB. To the white-hat who is saving our asset, you can contact us,” the on-chain message reads.
The crypto industry has witnessed a number of such incidents like this where hackers have been found outsmarting developers and all other security measures. In this particular case, LuBian was using an algorithm to generate private keys, which was prone to brute-force attacks.
The Largest Ever Crypto Hack
With the stolen amount now sitting at $14.5 billion, the LuBian exploit is now considered the largest ever crypto hack. It also marks LuBian hacker entity as 13th largest Bitcoin holder, far ahead of various crypto exchanges and Mt. Gox hacker.
Also Read: ‘Bitcoin August Curse’ Could Trigger Drop Below $90K: Kiyosaki
