A crypto-wallet tied to a slightly well-known Chinese mining pool may have been the victim of the biggest Bitcoin theft ever registered, according to new finds from Arkham Intelligence.
In a 2nd August thread on X, the Onchain Analytics company said it had revealed evidence that 127,426 BTC – worth $ 3.5 billion at the time – was stolen from Lubian Mining Pool at the end of December 2020.
Lubian was one of the largest Bitcoin mine pools globally by 2020, and reportedly controlled nearly 6% of Bitcoin’s total hash rate from May that year. The hack, if confirmed, would eclipse the extent of other high -profile exploits such as Mt. Gox and BitFinex with nominal value at the time of loss.
Arkham’s analysis indicates that on December 28, 2020, more than 90% of Lubian’s BTC holdings were drained. Two days later, another theft that involved about $ 6 million occurred worth of BTC and USDT, linked to a Lubian address operating on the Bitcoin Omni layer. The company seems to have moved its remaining 11,886 BTC – then worth hundreds of millions – to the recovery audience by December 31, 2020.
A remarkable detail in Arkham’s report is the presence of OP_RETurn messages – Special transactions that make it possible to integrate data into Bitcoin Blockchain – sent from Lubian to the hacker. According to Arkham, the mining pool used 1.4 BTC across over 1,500 transactions that tried to contact the thief and called them to return the stolen funds. This effort suggests that the messages were genuine and stem from the rightful wallet owner.
Arkham believes that the vulnerability may be stemmed from Lubian’s use of a defective private key generation algorithm that left it susceptible to brute-force attacks. The stolen BTC has apparently remained largely sleeping, with the last major movement was a wallet consolidation in July 2024.
Due to the award assessment of Bitcoin since 2020, the current value of the stolen assets is estimated to be $ 14.5 billion. This means that the wallet is associated with the Lubic hacker on the 13th largest BTC holder traced by Arkham – which surpasses the possessions associated with Mt. Gox violation.
As of today, both hacker and lubian are still believed to control their respective BTC balance. Arkham has published wallet trackers for both parties, but no further details of the identities involved have been revealed.
