Crypto exchange Bybit announced on Friday that “a sophisticated attack” led to the theft of Ethereum (ETH) from one of the company’s offline wallets.
Bybit’s chief executive and co-founder Ben Zhou said in a livestream that the hackers stole around 401,346 ETH, which at the time of the theft amounts to about $1.4 billion.
Both crypto security firm Elliptic, as well as crypto security researcher ZachXBT, the total amount of ETH stolen is worth around $1.4 billion, making this the largest known theft of crypto in history. The previous highest crypto breaches were the hacks against the Ronin Network and Poly Network, which resulted in the loss of $624 million and $611 million, respectively, according to data collected by Rekt, a site that tracks web3 and crypto breaches.
“In fact, it may even be the largest single theft of all time,” Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s co-founder and chief scientist told TechCrunch, referring to any kind of theft, not just data breaches.
Prior to Bybit’s breach, the withdrawal of around $1 billion from the Central Bank of Iraq is said to be the largest bank robbery of all time, according to the financial news site World Finance.
Zhou wrote on X that the hacker “took control” of one of the company’s cold wallets, referring to a digital wallet that stores cryptocurrency but in theory isn’t connected to the internet, and transferred funds to a “warm” wallet, which is online.
When reached for comment, Bybit spokesperson Tony Au referred to Zhou’s public posts. In one post, Zhou wrote that the company is “solvent” and “can cover the loss” even if it can’t recover the stolen funds.
Bybit, which is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, had an estimated total assets of $16 billion as of last week, according to CoinMarketCap.
To put things in perspective, in all of 2024, the total amount of crypto stolen by hackers was around $2.2 billion, according to blockchain tracking firm Chainalysis. And, in 2023, it was around $2 billion, according to multiple estimates.