LuBian’s $14.5B Bitcoin Heist: The Silent Hack That Shook Crypto in 2020
December 2020: While the world was distracted by holiday cheer and year-end rallies, LuBian got gutted. A stealthy hack siphoned off Bitcoin now worth a staggering $14.5 billion—making it one of crypto’s most expensive ‘oops’ moments.
How’d it happen? No flashy exploits, no Hollywood-style cyber showdowns. Just a quiet breach that slipped past defenses while everyone was probably arguing about ‘to the moon’ memes.
The aftermath? A masterclass in how not to store digital gold. The thieves vanished faster than a meme coin’s liquidity, leaving behind a trail of ‘what-ifs’ and a painful lesson in cold storage hygiene.
Funny how a space obsessed with ‘not your keys, not your coins’ keeps losing keys—and coins. Maybe next time, someone will check the locks before leaving $14.5B in the digital equivalent of a sock drawer.
LuBian hack surpasses Bybit’s $1.5 billion theft
LuBian’s loss shattered the previous record, set by Bybit in February 2025, when hackers stole $1.5 billion, according to Cryptopolitan.
About $1.46 billion worth of mETH and stETH streamed out to four Ethereum addresses, with parts swapped immediately on decentralized marketplaces.
On-chain sleuth ZachXBT spotted the suspicious outflow, and firm Cyvers flagged odd activity from the exchange’s wallets. Bybit had earlier confronted an unrelated “address poisoning” attack.
Most of the stolen tokens were swapped for ETH on decentralized exchanges and then run through mixers to hide them. It was one of the first big exchange hacks of 2025.
Bybit said the incident was a routine fund transfer between cold and hot wallets, but that hackers subverted the destination address. No internal breach of systems occurred, according to the company.
Investigators had pinpointed five wallets involved in the attack. ZachXBT warned that all other exchanges and services should blacklist these addresses to prevent further losses.
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