Bybit CEO Drops Bombshell: Over 25% of Stolen Crypto Vanishes into Thin Air!

Ben Zhou Spills the Beans on the $1.5 Billion Heist

Holy smokes! Bybit's head honcho, Ben Zhou, just dropped a bombshell on X, revealing that a whopping 27.6% of the $1.5 billion swiped in the March Bybit hack has completely vanished! These funds took a wild ride through crypto mixers, hopped across chains, and ended up in the murky world of over-the-counter and peer-to-peer exchanges. Talk about a disappearing act!

In his Apr. 21 post, Zhou laid it all out: out of the $1.4 billion in stolen loot, which is around 500k ETH, only 68.57% is still traceable. A staggering 27.59% has gone dark, and a measly 3.84% has been frozen. The untraceable funds took a detour through mixers, then crossed bridges to P2P and OTC platforms. And get this, they've been at it recently...

But wait, there's more! A jaw-dropping 84.5% of the stolen ETH, that's about 432,000 ETH, was converted into Bitcoin using THORChain and scattered across a mind-boggling 35,000 wallets. Only 6,000 ETH, a mere 1.17% of the loot, is still chilling on the Ethereum blockchain.

North Korea's Lazarus Group: The Masterminds Behind the Heist?

Rumors are swirling that North Korea's state-sponsored Lazarus Group might be behind this audacious heist. These cyber ninjas allegedly compromised a Safe{Wallet} developer system, snuck in some malicious code into Bybit's signers' interface, and redirected the funds to their own wallets, making the transactions look as legit as a three-dollar bill.

Bybit isn't taking this lying down, though. They've frozen any remaining assets, teamed up with investigators to hunt down the stolen cash, and even put a 10% bounty on the table for anyone who can help recover the funds. And get this, they've managed to handle 99.99% of withdrawal requests while staying fully solvent. Talk about resilience!

Zhou is calling on all the bounty hunters out there to help track down the funds that have been hidden through mixers. "We need a lot of help there down the road," he said. In the last 60 days alone, they've received a whopping 5,443 bounty reports, with 70 of them being legit. This incident has put the crypto industry on high alert, pushing for better security and tighter monitoring of cross-chain and privacy tools.

And in a shocking twist, eXch, a privacy-focused crypto exchange that's been linked to the laundering, announced on Apr. 17 that they're shutting down on May 1. They claim they're feeling the heat from an international investigation and swear they didn't knowingly help with any shady business.