- Arkham recently discussed the status of the 127,426 Bitcoin stolen from the LuBian mining pool.
- The funds remain within the hacker’s address, which the perpetrator consolidated last year.
- The Chinese company remains mum on the hacking incident.
Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain intelligence platform, recently broke the news about the whereabouts of a missing Bitcoin haul worth billions of dollars. An unknown hacker stole the digital asset stockpile from a Chinese Bitcoin mining pool.
The Most Expensive Bitcoin Hack
According to Arkham’s report, it has just uncovered the most expensive Bitcoin hack to date, which goes all the way back to December 2020. On-chain data revealed that the theft involved 127,426 BTC, and it traced the origin of the funds to LuBian.
LuBian was a Chinese mining pool stationed in China and Iran. Arkham valued the BTC haul at $3.5 billion at the time of the incident. This translates to roughly $14.5 billion at the prevailing $114,000 per BTC rate.
Mt. Gox still holds the record for having the most Bitcoin stolen in a hacking incident, at around 744,000 BTC. However, all these were only worth hundreds of millions of dollars until the collapse of the Japanese exchange.
Mt. Gox’s numbers were less than the dollar-equivalent of the multi-billion lost in the LuBian hack. Nonetheless, the BTC it lost before its closure should have been worth over $84.8 billion by now.
Rise and Fall of LuBian
LuBian entered the Bitcoin mining scene in April 2020 based on the Arkham monitoring platform. It immediately made an impact in the industry, taking control of almost 6% of the Bitcoin network’s total hash rate by the following month. The move also positioned it among the crypto mining pools in the BTC ecosystem. However, it left the scene as quickly as it had arrived after losing its multi-billion-dollar Bitcoin assets.
LuBian only provides a few details about its business on its official website. It has no information related to its owner or its operators.
The Bitcoin mining pool’s website is still up today, but there’s no indication if it’s still actively managed. Moreover, it has never acknowledged the theft of its Bitcoin assets since 2020.
On the other hand, its wallet shows that it was able to secure around 11,886 BTC, currently worth $1.36 billion. Strangely, all the stolen Bitcoin is still within the hacker’s wallet address, with their last movement recorded in July 2024 after a wallet consolidation.
Arkham Findings on the Lost Bitcoin
Arkham said Lubian’s use of an algorithm to generate its private keys made it vulnerable to brute-force attacks. The hackers likely utilized the exploit to siphon the funds.
Lubian only saved its remaining BTC assets by rotating them in recovery wallets. The analytics firm noted that the mining platform tried to ask each hacker’s address to return the funds via an OP_RETURN message, to which it spent around 1.4 BTC across 1,516 different transactions to send each message.
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