BREAKING: Chinese Mining Pool Behind Largest Bitcoin Heist in History—Arkham Exposes the Trail

Crypto intelligence firm Arkham just dropped a bombshell—the mother of all Bitcoin heists traces back to a Chinese mining pool. Forget Ocean’s Eleven; this digital caper rewrites the rules of crypto crime.

How it went down

No fancy hacks or zero-day exploits. Just old-fashioned human greed meeting blockchain’s immutable ledger. Arkham’s forensics team followed the satoshi crumbs straight to the mining pool’s doorstep.

Why Wall Street’s sweating

While traditional finance still debates Bitcoin ETFs, someone just proved decentralized assets move faster than compliance departments. The irony? This heist probably funded more Lambos than your average hedge fund’s crypto portfolio.

The takeaway: In crypto, the house doesn’t always win—sometimes the miners do. Until regulators catch up, the wild west of digital gold rushes continues. Just remember—next time your broker lectures about ‘secure investments,’ ask how their vaults compare to a properly cold-stored Bitcoin wallet.

Bigger than Mt. Gox

The breach went unreported for over four years despite draining nearly all of LuBian’s holdings. The mining pool, which was once top-ten globally with 6% of Bitcoin’s hash rate, mysteriously shut down in early 2021. The closure was previously attributed to regulatory pressure, but is now understood to be the result of this catastrophic hack.

Arkham reported that the mining pool appears to have been first hacked in December 2020 for over 90% of its BTC. Later that month, around $6 million of additional BTC and USDT was stolen from a LuBian address active on the Bitcoin Omni layer. The miner rotated their remaining funds to recovery wallets at the end of December 2020.

Arkham believes the theft was enabled by weak private key generation, vulnerable to brute-force attacks. LuBian made desperate attempts to recover the funds, sending over 1,500 small transactions with 1.4 BTC with messages pleading for the return of the funds, but the hacker never responded.

LuBian preserved 11,886 BTC, currently worth $1.35 billion, which they still hold; however, the hacker also still holds the stolen BTC, with their last known movement being a wallet consolidation in July 2024.

The massive heist makes the LuBian hacker the 13th largest bitcoin holder on Arkham, ahead of the Mt. Gox hacker, it stated.

Big Year For Crypto Hacks

Cybersecurity firm Certik reported that around $153 million was lost, combining all the exploits and scams in July.

Around $86.6 million was attributed to incidents involving exchanges, while $55.4 million was lost in incidents related to code vulnerabilities, it revealed.

#CertiKStatsAlert

Combining all the incidents in July we’ve confirmed ~$153M lost to exploits and scams.

~$86.6M is attributed to incidents involving exchanges.

Incidents related to code vulnerabilities represent ~$55.4M losses.

More details below pic.twitter.com/1EsEFmZa1f

— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) August 2, 2025

Meanwhile, Hacken reported that $3.1 billion has been lost in the first six months of 2025, and it was DeFi’s “worst quarter since early 2023.”

A surge in social engineering and AI-driven attacks was to blame for the losses, which have already exceeded those in all of 2024, it stated.