Hackers who breached Bybit stole $1.4 billion

Hackers who breached Bybit stole $1.4 billion, but CEO Ben Zhou confirmed that $1.07 billion of the stolen funds remains traceable.

Hackers breached derivatives exchange Bybit in March, stealing $1.4 billion in cryptocurrency, with $1.07 billion of the stolen funds still traceable, confirmed Ben Zhou, CEO of Bybit.

The hackers’ activity was reported in March, but the full scope of the theft was disclosed on Thursday.

Of the stolen funds, $280 million has been laundered, while investigators have managed to freeze $42 million. Bounty hunters, including Mantle, Paraswap, and ZachXBT, who assisted in asset recovery efforts, were rewarded a total of $2.1 million.

A significant portion of the stolen Ethereum was converted into Bitcoin using THORChain, a decentralized platform. Approximately $1 billion worth of ETH was swapped for BTC and dispersed across thousands of wallets, boosting THORChain’s transaction volume to $5.8 billion. The platform also collected $5.5 million in fees from these transactions.

However, security researcher Taylor Monahan accused THORChain of enabling money laundering under the banner of decentralization and claimed that its ecosystem benefits insiders.

Beyond THORChain, stolen assets were channeled through other platforms, including ExCH and OKX Web3 Proxy. OKX facilitated the movement of $100 million in ETH, with $65 million still pending further tracking.

ExCH initially denied any involvement but later acknowledged that a portion of the stolen funds passed through its system and stated its intention to donate any related fees to charity.