$1.5 Billion Bybit Heist Linked to Greek Crypto Platform—Here’s What Went Down
Another day, another crypto hack—except this one’s got a Mediterranean twist. The $1.5 billion looted from Bybit? Traced straight to a Greek exchange. Who needs oceans when you’ve got blockchain bridges?
How the Money Moved
Digital forensics teams followed the breadcrumbs—er, transactions—across wallets and protocols. Spoiler: It wasn’t exactly offshore accounts and palm trees. Just a Greek platform allegedly playing middleman for stolen funds.
Security Failures or Insider Job?
Speculation’s raging. Was it sloppy KYC checks? A rogue employee? Or just another Tuesday in crypto, where ‘trustless’ systems still need, well, trust?
Regulators Already Behind the Curve
While authorities scramble to ‘understand the technology,’ the thieves are probably sipping frappés—or cashing out via privacy coins. Classic finance, meet your decentralized nightmare.
Bottom line: $1.5 billion vanishes, and the industry keeps pretending self-custody solves everything. Maybe next time, try a vault—or at least a better password.
Tracing Bybit’s stolen funds
Bybit managed to retain liquidity in the immediate aftermath of the devastating attack, leaning on short-term “bridge loans” from other crypto firms like Galaxy Digital, FalconX, and Wintermute, but many of the stolen funds have yet to be recovered.
Bybit claims to have recovered $42.89 million of the assets at the time of writing, with roughly 88.87% of the missing crypto traceable to investigators on the blockchain as of late March.
However, Bybit says that around 7.59% of the funds have “gone dark,” due to the use of anonymity-preserving tools like cryptocurrency mixers such as Wasabi, CryptoMixer, Railgun, and Tornado Cash, meaning they will likely never be recovered. An additional 3.54% of funds have been frozen through collaboration with other exchanges.
Reports on the incident have noted the complexity and speed of the North Korean team's money laundering operations, saying this may suggest the presence of complex crypto-laundering infrastructure in neighboring countries like China.
Edited by Stephen Graves
