Crypto Tanks After Bybit Suffers From Record $1.4 Billion Hack
The world's second-largest crypto exchange Bybit lost $1.4 billion in an exploit supposedly orchestrated by North Korea
It was a tough wrap to the week for crypto — but an even tougher wrap for Bybit CEO Ben Zhou. He spent the majority of his day trying to address fears from customers rushing for the exits after a hacker drained $1.4 billion in Ethereum from one of his company’s wallets.
What ensued was a “massive surge” in Bybit withdrawals and the entire crypto space watching in real-time as the thief rotated $1.4 billion worth of ETH to new wallets and eventually sold off hundreds of millions worth of tokens.
Ethereum swung 5% lower on Friday — right as the entire industry was celebrating the fact that the SEC just announced it would be dropping numerous crypto cases it had brought under the prior administration, including the big one against Coinbase and the other one against NFT platform OpenSea. Let’s dig in…
The Largest Heist in Crypto
Considering Bitcoin once fell 20% in a day back in 2016 when the then largest-ever hack occurred on Bitfinex, maybe the 5% drop in Ethereum today should be celebrated. That hack was worth about $72 million at the time, this one is $1.4 BILLION. So, maybe a pro/con there in just showing how far we’ve come (and maybe not so much.)
This hack was interesting in that it seemed to exploit the very measures almost all crypto companies take to safeguard funds. But when Bybit went to move those safeguarded funds, an exploiter masked the transaction of those funds to go from the cold wallet to a different Bybit wallet, and instead directed more than 400,000 ether to the hacker’s address. I’ll let the InfoSec people figure out exactly how — but for now you can read about how Bybit handled the disaster on our site, or in our recap video below:
The Memecoin Blowback
"Iggy Azalea crawled so Donald J. Trump could walk, apparently," - Crypto Investor Travis Kling
After Argentina’s President helped launched a token that instantly nuked 95% in just hours — it seemed as if the entire crypto industry realized we had a problem. Mainly, that these tokens were clearly being allocated to insiders — and clearly there was some insider trading going on. This week, the co-founder at one of the largest market makers behind Trump’s token, and Milei’s recent launch resigned.
"People have been calling it crime season. People have been calling it that since Trump launched his memecoin," Travis Kling said in a legendary interview this week. In his view, the involvement of political figures like Donald Trump and Javier Milei in memecoins has pushed the space to a level of grift that can no longer be ignored.
You can read the full breakdown on our site, or watch the heated interview here:
We’ll be back on Monday with our live recap of all things crypto.