Source: CLS Silicon Valley NEWS
Last week, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange Bybit was hacked, with a total of $1.46 billion worth of ETH stolen, setting a new record for the largest single-token theft in history.
It is reported that this theft seems to be related to the hacker group Lazarus Group, with hackers taking control of Bybit's Ethereum wallets on the Ethereum network and transferring the tokens to an unknown address.
However, Bybit did not panic. Its co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou stated that even if the losses caused by this hack cannot be recovered, Bybit has the ability to compensate, and all customer assets are 1:1 supported, so Bybit can make up for the related losses.
Zhou said that Bybit has $20 billion in reserve assets and can make up for any unrecovered funds through its own means or through loans from partners.
According to the official announcement, Bybit has launched a "bounty recovery program" and is calling on elite cybersecurity and cryptocurrency analysis experts around the world to jointly investigate the "mastermind" behind the largest cryptocurrency theft in history. Contributors who successfully recover the funds will receive a 10% reward, and the total bounty is calculated based on the verifiable recovery amount of the stolen ETH worth over $1.4 billion at the time of the incident. If all the funds are recovered, the total bounty could be as high as $140 million (about RMB 1.015 billion).
Bybit has over 60 million customers worldwide and is the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of trading volume globally. After the news of the hacking incident broke last Friday, the price of ETH temporarily fell by more than 4%, but has now almost returned to its previous level.
On Monday, Ben Zhou pointed out that Bybit has fully compensated for the $1.4 billion ETH theft. According to blockchain company Lookonchain's estimates, Bybit has obtained 446,870 ETH, worth $1.23 billion, through loans and large holders.
In addition, after the hacking incident, Bybit saw a large influx of customers requesting to withdraw funds. Ben Zhou said that the number of withdrawal requests exceeded 350,000. As of last Saturday, Bybit's customer withdrawals had exceeded $5.3 billion.
Currently, Bybit's reserves remain healthy, and there are no liquidity risks.
Although Bybit has not been devastated by this, the theft has still put the entire industry on alert. CZ, the co-founder of Binance, emphasized that the exchanges that have been hacked all have different multi-signature solution providers, indicating that the hackers' methods are not targeted at a single provider, but are a systemic problem.
Industry executives suggest increasing the transparency of cryptocurrency transactions and moving from traditional multi-signature to more secure architectures. At the same time, Bybit's swift actions to stabilize investor sentiment have also been praised.
