Arkham unveils $3.5B hack of Chinese BTC mining pool

Blockchain analytics firm Arkham has disclosed that Chinese Bitcoin mining pool LuBian suffered a previously unreported hack in December 2020, losing 127,426 BTC—about $3.5 billion at the time and roughly $14.5 billion at current prices. Arkham’s on-chain analysis indicates that LuBian, which operated mining facilities in China and Iran and controlled around 6% of Bitcoin’s hashrate in 2020, was drained in a series of transfers that effectively wiped out the pool’s holdings and contributed to its disappearance. Neither LuBian nor the attacker has ever publicly acknowledged the incident, and Arkham is the first to attribute and quantify the theft. According to Arkham, the primary theft occurred on December 28, 2020, when more than 90% of LuBian’s Bitcoin was moved from its wallets, followed by an additional theft of about $6 million in BTC and USDT on December 29 via an address using Bitcoin’s Omni layer. On December 31, LuBian shifted its remaining funds—about 11,886 BTC, now worth around $1.35 billion—into recovery wallets, which it still controls. Arkham’s analysis suggests the attacker likely exploited a weakness in LuBian’s private key generation algorithm, making its keys vulnerable to brute-force attacks. The stolen coins remain largely unmoved aside from a consolidation in July 2024, leaving the hacker among the largest known Bitcoin holders and making this, by Arkham’s accounting, the largest crypto hack in history, surpassing even Mt. Gox when measured by value at the time of theft. This disclosure is significant on several fronts: it retroactively reorders the history of major crypto exploits, highlights security risks in large mining operations, and underscores how opaque the Bitcoin ecosystem can be even around systemically important actors like top mining pools. It also shows that multi-billion-dollar compromises can remain undisclosed for years when victims and attackers both stay silent, with the only visibility coming from independent forensic work on public blockchains. "entities":["Arkham","Arkham Intelligence","LuBian","LuBian mining pool","Bitcoin","BTC","Tether","USDT","Bitcoin Omni layer","Mt. Gox","Bybit"]}`

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