LuBian’s $14.5B Bitcoin Heist: The Silent 2020 Hack That Still Stings
A shadow crept into LuBian’s vaults in December 2020—no alarms, no headlines. Now, the stolen Bitcoin could buy a small country.
The stealth attack
While the world obsessed over memecoins and stimulus checks, hackers slipped past LuBian’s defenses. The haul? Enough BTC to make Wall Street bankers weep into their spreadsheets.
2025’s brutal math
That ‘modest’ 2020 theft now stares back at us with a $14.5B price tag—proof that in crypto, even yesterday’s security failures keep compounding. Like a hedge fund’s management fees.
The lesson? In decentralized finance, your keys aren’t just money—they’re time bombs. And LuBian’s just keeps ticking louder.
LuBian hack surpasses Bybit’s $1.5 billion theft
LuBian’s loss shattered the previous record, set by Bybit in February 2025, when hackers stole $1.5 billion, according to Cryptopolitan.
About $1.46 billion worth of mETH and stETH streamed out to four ethereum addresses, with parts swapped immediately on decentralized marketplaces.
On-chain sleuth ZachXBT spotted the suspicious outflow, and firm Cyvers flagged odd activity from the exchange’s wallets. Bybit had earlier confronted an unrelated “address poisoning” attack.
Most of the stolen tokens were swapped for ETH on decentralized exchanges and then run through mixers to hide them. It was one of the first big exchange hacks of 2025.
Bybit said the incident was a routine fund transfer between cold and hot wallets, but that hackers subverted the destination address. No internal breach of systems occurred, according to the company.
Investigators had pinpointed five wallets involved in the attack. ZachXBT warned that all other exchanges and services should blacklist these addresses to prevent further losses.
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