A cryptographic wallet linked to a little known Chinese mining group may have been the victim of Bitcoin’s greatest robbery ever registered, according to new Arkham Intelligence findings.
In a thread of August 2 in X, Ochain’s analysis firm said it had discovered evidence that 127,426 BTC, with a value of $ 3.5 billion at that time, was stolen from the Lubian Mining Group at the end of December 2020. Neither Lubian nor the suspected Hacker have publicly recognized the breach of the breach, and Arkham said that he is the first to report the incident.
Lubian was one of the largest Bitcoin mining groups worldwide in 2020, according to reports, controlling almost 6% of Bitcoin’s total hash rate as of May of that year. The hack, if confirmed, would eclipse the scale of other high -profile feats such as Mt. Gox and Bitfinex by nominal value at the time of loss.
Arkham’s analysis indicates that on December 28, 2020, more than 90% of Lubian BTC holdings were drained. Two days later, there was another robbery that involved around $ 6 million in BTC and USDT, linked to a Lubian direction that operates in the Bitcoin omni layer. The company seems to have transferred its remaining 11,886 BTC, then a value of hundreds of millions, to recovery wallets before December 31, 2020.
A remarkable detail in the Arkham report is the presence of OP_RETURN messages, special transactions that allow the data to be integrated into the Bitcoin block chain, sent from Lubian to the hacker. According to Arkham, the mining group spent 1.4 BTC in more than 1,500 transactions trying to contact the thief, urging them to return the stolen funds. This effort suggests that the messages were genuine and originated in the legitimate owner of the wallet.
Arkham believes that vulnerability may have arisen from the use of Lubian from an algorithm of defective private keys that left him susceptible to brute force attacks. The stolen BTC has apparently remained inactive, and the last important movement is a wallet consolidation in July 2024.
Due to the appreciation of Bitcoin’s price since 2020, the current value of stolen assets is estimated at $ 14.5 billion. That makes the wallet associated with Lubian’s hacker the 13th largest BTC support tracked by Arkham, exceeding holdings linked to the rape of Mount Gox.
As of today, it is believed that both the hacker and the Lubian still control their respective BTC balances. Arkham has published wallet trackers for both parties, but no additional details have been revealed about the identities involved.
