Bybit’s Biggest Hack: What Investigators Have Found

Hackers who breached Bybit stole $1.4 billion, but CEO Ben Zhou confirmed that $1.07 billion of the stolen funds remains traceable.

While $280 million has been laundered, investigators successfully froze $42 million. To assist in asset recovery, bounty hunters, including Mantle, Paraswap, and ZachXBT, were rewarded $2.1 million.

A large portion of the stolen Ethereum was converted into Bitcoin using THORChain, a decentralized platform. Roughly $1 billion worth of ETH was swapped for BTC and dispersed across thousands of wallets, driving THORChain’s transaction volume to $5.8 billion.

The platform also earned $5.5 million in fees from these transactions. Security researcher Taylor Monahan accused THORChain of enabling money laundering under the pretense of decentralization, claiming its ecosystem benefits insiders.

Beyond THORChain, stolen assets were funneled through other platforms, including ExCH and OKX Web3 Proxy. OKX processed $100 million in ETH, with $65 million still requiring further tracking.

Meanwhile, ExCH, which initially denied involvement, later admitted a portion of the stolen funds had moved through its system and pledged to donate any related fees.