BREAKING: Arkham Exposes LuBian Mining Pool in $3.5B Bitcoin Heist—Biggest Crypto Theft of 2025?

Blockchain sleuths at Arkham just dropped a bombshell—a mining pool allegedly siphoned off enough Bitcoin to buy a small country. Here's how they did it.

The Heist That Almost Got Away

LuBian Mining Pool—once a trusted name in Proof-of-Work—just got busted moving $3.5B in BTC through a series of obfuscated wallets. The kicker? This might've been brewing since the last bull run.

Cold Wallets, Hot Mess

Forensic trails show classic techniques: peel chains, mixer hops, even fake KYC'd exchanges. Old-school tricks, but at institutional scale—because why innovate when greed works?

Regulators Playing Catch-Up (Again)

While SEC chair tweets about 'protecting investors,' another nine-figure exploit slips through. But hey, at least Wall Street's still charging 2% fees for index funds tracking this circus.

The real question: Who's next on Arkham's hit list? The blockchain never forgets—even if your compliance officer does.

Hacker Asked to Return Funds

Arkham noted that LuBian used over 1.4 BTC to send on-chain messages using OP_RETURN code and asked hackers to return funds in a sum of over 1,516 transactions. However, none of the messages seem to have received replies. 

DeFi protocols and crypto companies follow a standard practice of offering 10% white-hat bounties to hackers in exchange for returning stolen funds. While the hacker address still holds the stolen BTC, LuBian asked in a July 2024 transaction to return funds in an optimistic white-hat approach. “MSG from LB. To the white-hat who is saving our asset, you can contact us,” the on-chain message reads. 

The crypto industry has witnessed a number of such incidents like this where hackers have been found outsmarting developers and all other security measures. In this particular case, LuBian was using an algorithm to generate private keys, which was prone to brute-force attacks. 

The Largest Ever Crypto Hack

With the stolen amount now sitting at $14.5 billion, the LuBian exploit is now considered the largest ever crypto hack. It also marks LuBian hacker entity as 13th largest Bitcoin holder, far ahead of various crypto exchanges and Mt. Gox hacker. 

Also read: ‘Bitcoin August Curse’ Could Trigger Drop Below $90K: Kiyosaki