Crypto exchange Bybit wallets have been hacked by a hacker, causing what crypto analysts say is the loss of nearly $1.5 billion worth of cryptocurrency in the biggest theft the industry has ever experienced, Bloomberg reported.
In this regard, the exchange’s CEO, Ben Zhou, said in a post on X on Friday (February 21) that a hacker took control of one of Bybit’s offline Ethereum wallets. According to Bloomberg, ZachXBT, an on-chain analyst at Telegram, reported in a post that an estimated $1.46 billion in assets had left the wallet in a series of suspicious transactions.
Cryptocurrency company Arkham Intelligence has confirmed that there has been an outflow of about $1.4 billion from the exchange. According to the post on X, the funds have started moving to new addresses where they are being sold, and $200 million worth of Ether derivatives have been sold so far.
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic considers the hack to be the largest crypto theft ever, surpassing the $611 million stolen from the Poly network in 2021, while Rob Behnke, co-founder and executive chairman of blockchain security firm Halborn, called it “the largest incident ever”.
According to Bloomberg, a Bybit spokesperson confirmed the hack, pointing to an official statement in which the platform said the hacker had altered the code underlying the transaction that Bybit’s original wallet had agreed to by bypassing the signing interface for transfers between its two wallets.
As a result, the attacker was able to gain control of the affected ETH cold wallet and transfer its holdings to an unknown address, the platform said in a statement.
Bybit:
Founded in 2018, Bybit is one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, regulated by several agencies including the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) and Kazakhstan’s Astana Financial Services Authority (AFSA), processing more than $36 billion in average daily trading volume. According to Bloomberg, Dubai-headquartered Bybit had about $16.2 billion in assets on its exchange before it was hacked, and CoinMarketCap reserve data indicates that the stolen Ether equates to about 9% of its total assets.
Ether at about 3:20 p.m. ZachXBT slipped as much as 5% after the initial Telegram post and, on the other hand, Friday London time, but later in the day trading was slightly higher overall, and other cryptocurrencies were not affected by the move.
Athena Labs’ USDe, a popular token among crypto buyers and sellers that acts like a “synthetic dollar,” briefly lost its one-to-one value to trade at around 98 cents, according to CoinGecko data, and the project said that although it conducts some trading on Bybit, it remains fully parallel, Bloomberg reported.
Source: Bloomberg
Also Read: Mark Zuckerberg overtakes Larry Ellison to become the third richest person in the world
