Arkham Exposes $14 Billion Bitcoin Heist—Overtakes Bybit’s $1.5 Billion Hack as Largest Crypto Theft in History
Blockchain sleuths at Arkham Intelligence just dropped a bombshell—a previously unknown $14 billion Bitcoin theft now dwarfs Bybit’s infamous $1.5 billion breach. The crypto underworld’s scoreboard just got rewritten.
How’d they find it? Arkham’s forensic tools traced dormant wallets suddenly moving mountains of BTC—old-school cold storage turned hot potato. No fancy bridge exploits or flash loan tricks here—just old-fashioned digital burglary at scale.
Who got hit? That’s the trillion-satoshi question. Early signs point to a mix of institutional custody solutions and whale wallets from crypto’s wild west era (back when securing private keys meant writing them on a Denny’s napkin).
While TradFi bankers clutch their pearls, Bitcoiners shrug—the network’s immutable ledger means stolen coins leave permanent breadcrumbs. Unlike Wall Street’s ‘oops-we-lost-your-money’ moments, blockchain thefts at least come with public receipts.
One thing’s certain: someone’s HODLing strategy just got violently interrupted. The heist’s timing—amid Bitcoin’s latest bull run—proves crypto’s golden rule: where there’s digital gold, there are bandits with Lambo dreams.
Arkham Intelligence Unveils $14 Billion Hack on Chinese Mining Pool LuBian
In an X post, Arkham revealed that it had uncovered a $3.5 billion bitcoin heist, the largest ever. This hack was on LuBian, which was a Chinese mining pool with facilities in China and Iran. The analytics platform stated that 127,426 BTC appears to have been stolen from LuBian in December 2020. These coins, which were worth $3.5 billion at the time, are now valued at $14.5 billion based on the current Bitcoin price.
Furthermore, the platform noted that neither LuBian nor the hacker has publicly acknowledged the hack since it took place in 2020. At the time, the Chinese firm was one of the world’s largest mining pools, controlling almost 6% of the Bitcoin network’s total hash rate as of May 2020. Arkham revealed that the mining pool appears to have been first hacked on December 28, 2020, for over 90% of its BTC.
The hacker subsequently stole around $6 million worth of BTC and USDT on December 29 from a LuBian address that was active on the Bitcoin Omni layer. On December 31, LuBian then rotated its remaining funds to recovery wallets. This hack trumps the Bybit hack of $1.5 billion, which occurred on February 21 earlier this year.
Unlike the LuBian hack, which involved Bitcoin, hackers stole over 400,000 ETH from Bybit’s cold wallets through social engineering. As a result, the hackers were able to authorize these transfers despite the wallets being multisig.
Attempts To Recover The Stolen Bitcoin
Arkham also revealed that LuBian had made attempts to recover the stolen Bitcoin by contacting the hacker. The Chinese mining pool had sent OP_RETURN messages, in which it asked the hacker to return their funds. The analytics platform stated that the firm spent 1.4 BTC across 1516 different transactions to send these messages.
Arkham claimed that the messages suggest that this was not a spoof from another hacker who had brute-forced the private keys. This appears to have been how LuBian was hacked in the first place, as the mining pool is said to have been using an algorithm to generate private keys that were susceptible to brute-force attacks.
Arkham revealed that LuBian still holds 11,886 BTC, currently worth around $1.35 billion. Meanwhile, the hacker still holds the stolen Bitcoin, which they are known to have last consolidated in another wallet in July 2024. Thanks to Bitcoin’s surge over the years, the LuBian hacker is now the 13th largest BTC holder based on Arkham data, ahead of the Mt. Gox hacker.
