Bybit Offers $140M Bounty to Recover $1.4B Hacked Funds

Ben Zhou, CEO of well-known cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, shared an update on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) today March 20, 2025.

Ben Zhou, CEO of well-known cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, shared an update on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) today March 20, 2025. The post shared details about the laundering of $1.4 billion in hacked cryptocurrency, including 500,000 ETH.

According to the recent post, approximately 86.29% of these stolen funds, which is equivalent to $1.23 billion have been converted into 12,836 BTC and have been sent across 9,117 wallets. On an average, each wallet holds approximately 1.41 BTC.

Hackers Made Use of Bitcoin Mixers

The hackers have played it smart and have turned to Bitcoin mixers (a service that uses complex algorithms and cryptography to mix and make it difficult to find the origin of the Bitcoin funds) like Wasabi, Crypto mixers, Railgun, and Tornado Cash to erase the origins of the illegal gains. Around 193 BTC were channeled through the Wasabi Mixer before being distributed to peer-to-peer (P2P) vendors.

As of now, 88.87% of the hacked funds remain traceable but 7.59% of the hack funds have no traceability at all and about 3.54% have been frozen by the authorities. Despite these efforts, decoding transactions that have passed through the mixers is the biggest challenge for the exchange and the security teams as of now.

ByBit Launched A Bounty Program

The exchange had also launched a bounty program called “Lazarusbounty” to recover the stolen funds. The program offers a total of $140 million in rewards which is 10% of the stolen amount. Over the past 30 days, Bybit has received 5,012 bounty reports from people assisting in tracking stolen assets. However, only 63 were found to be valid.

Zhou has also urged people to come forward and help Bybit decode these mixer transactions to combat this growing threat.

Previously such Bitcoin mixers were also used to carry out the Ronin Bridge Hack of 2022. The hackers stole $625 million and used mixers like Tornado Cash and Blender to launder the funds. They converted stolen Ethereum into Bitcoin and erased their tracks through these mixers.

These incidents highlight the increasing use of mixers by criminals to erase the tracks of the stolen funds. All this finally complicates the recovery efforts for the exchange or the law enforcement and blockchain analyst.