Despite the drama Zhou assured everyone that the company is still kicking it and can cover the losses even if the stolen cash can’t be clawed back.
Based in sunny Dubai Bybit was sitting pretty with an estimated $16 billion in total assets as of last week according to the CoinMarketCap gossip né?. Before this bombshell, the heftiest hauls were the Ronin Network and Poly Network breaches, where they lost $624 million and $611 million, respectively.
Tom Robinson, one of the brainiacs at Elliptic, chimed in saying this might just be the most massive single robbery on record, even beating out the Central Bank of Iraq’s $1 billion hit.
Zhou spilled the tea that the hacker swiped one of Bybit’s cold wallets and shimmied the funds over to a “warm” online wallet. So, get this: Bybit, the crypto exchange, spilled the beans on Friday that it got hit by a “fancy attack” which ended up with Ethereum (ETH) being stolen from an offline wallet.
Ben Zhou, the big cheese at Bybit, spilled the tea in a livestream that some hackers made off with about 401,346 ETH, worth a cool $1.4 billion at the time of the caper.
Word on the street from crypto security firm Elliptic and researcher ZachXBT is that the loot totals around $1.4 billion, making it the granddaddy of all crypto heists né?. To put things in perspective, hackers nabbed around $2.2 billion in crypto in 2024, and about $2 billion in 2023, as per Chainalysis and other sources.
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