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Whale Alert, a prominent blockchain tracker which monitors heavy cryptocurrency transactions, has spotted several large ETH withdrawals made consecutively from the Bybit exchange.
This platform is ill-famed for a recent massive hack, when it lost more than $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum to the North Korean hacker team known as Lazarus Group.
Yuri Molchan120,000 ETH leave Bybit into unknown, but destination identified
Whale Alert noticed four consecutive withdrawals, carrying 30,000 ETH worth roughly $60.4 million each. Those transfers summed up to 120,000 Ethereum valued at $241.82 million.
All four transactions from Bybit were made to wallets tagged by the blockchain tracker as anonymous.
However, the same data source provided details that reveal the destination of all four transactions – it was Bybit itself. This makes these transfers internal, as the second-biggest crypto exchange by trading volume after Binance seemed to have reshuffled its ETH holdings.
Arman ShirinyanBybit CEO's statement on retrieving stolen funds
Bybit’s chief executive officer Ben Zhou has published an executive summary on the funds stolen by Lazarus Group from Bybit earlier this year. On Feb. 21, Bybit faced an exploit of an Ethereum smart contract. As a result of that, $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum was drained by hackers.
That was the equivalent of approximately 500,000 ETH. Ben Zhou said that the largest portion of the stolen crypto (88.87%) is traceable, 7.59% cannot be traced any more and 3.54% of that ETH has been frozen thanks to the quick reaction of exchanges.
He added that 86.29% of the stolen Ethereum (roughly 440,000 ETH) has already been converted into Bitcoin – 12,836 BTC – and spread across almost 10,000 wallets. Each of them contains roughly 1.41 BTC.
The largest challenge for the Bybit team is now to decode transactions made through crypto mixer platforms used by the hackers. Those mixers are Wasbi, CryptoMixer, Railgun, and TornadoCash. After the mixers, the crypto is going to various p2p vendors.
As for the bounty program announced by Bybit, over the past month, per the CEO, 5,012 bounty reports have been received but only 63 of them proved to be valid. Overall, Bybit has promised to pay 10% of the stolen funds to all those who would help to retrieve the stolen ETH.
Vladislav Sopov
Dan Burgin