Bybit crypto hack: Exchange says hackers stole $1.5 billion in digital tokens

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit said last week hackers had stolen digital tokens worth around $1.5 billion, in what researchers called the biggest crypto heist of all time.

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit said last week that hackers had stolen digital tokens to the tune of about $1.5 billion, in what blockchain researchers have called the biggest crypto heist of all time.

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou said the crypto was taken from a “cold wallet” – a digital wallet that is usually stored offline and therefore supposedly more secure – that was used for ether tokens.

Blockchain research firm Elliptic said the hack was more than double the size of the previous biggest crypto heist, adding that “it is almost certainly the single largest known theft of any kind in all time.”

The crypto industry has seen a string of thefts, leading to questions about the security of customer funds, with hacking hauls totalling more than $2 billion in 2024 – the fourth straight year where proceeds have topped more than $1 billion.

Here are some of the other major thefts to have hit the industry since bitcoin was created in 2008.

POLY NETWORK

Hackers stole about $610 million in August 2021 from Poly Network, a platform that facilitates peer-to-peer token transactions. The hackers behind the heist later returned nearly all of the stolen funds.

The hack highlighted vulnerabilities in the booming decentralised finance – DeFi – sector, where users can lend, borrow and save in digital tokens, cutting out the traditional gatekeepers of finance like banks and exchanges.

RONIN NETWORK

Hackers stole cryptocurrency – at the time of the hack – to the value of about $540 million from a blockchain project linked to the popular online game Axie Infinity in March 2022.

Ronin, a network that allows crypto coins to be transferred across different blockchains, said hackers stole some 173,600 ether tokens and 25.5 million USD Coin tokens.

COINCHECK

In January 2018, hackers stole cryptocurrency then valued at about $530 million from Tokyo-based exchange Coincheck. The thieves attacked one of Coincheck’s “hot wallet” – a digital folder that is kept online – to siphon off the funds, putting a spotlight on security at exchanges.

South Korea’s intelligence agency said at the time that a North Korean hacking group was likely to have been behind the heist.

MT. GOX

In one of the earliest and highest-profile crypto hacks, bitcoin to the value of about $500 million was stolen from the Mt.Gox exchange in Tokyo – then the world’s biggest – between 2011 and 2014.

Mt.Gox, which at one point handled 80% of the world’s bitcoin trades, filed for bankruptcy in early 2014 after the hack was disclosed, with some 24,000 customers losing access to their funds.

WORMHOLE

DeFi site Wormhole was hit by a $320 million heist last month, with the hackers making off with 120,000 digital tokens pegged to the second-largest cryptocurrency, ether.

The crypto arm of Chicago-based Jump Trading, which had acquired the developer behind Wormhole the previous year, later replaced the funds “to make community members whole and support Wormhole now as it continues to develop.”

(Reporting by Tommy Reggiori Wilkes, Tom Wilson and Elizabeth Howcroft; Editing by Christina Fincher)