$14 Billion in Stolen Bitcoin?
Arkham Intelligence shook the crypto world this week with one of the wildest discoveries yet. They uncovered the largest Bitcoin theft ever—an eye-watering $14 billion.
What Happened?
The victim was LuBian, a massive Chinese mining pool. The theft originally took place in December 2020. At that time, 127,426 BTC were stolen, worth around $3.5 billion. Fast-forward to today, and that stash is now valued at more than $14 billion.
LuBian was once a top miner in the world. It controlled about 6% of Bitcoin’s hash rate in 2020. But after December 28 of that year, the mining pool was silently drained of over 90% of its Bitcoin.
A Hack in Silence
What’s wild is that neither LuBian nor the hacker publicly acknowledged the breach. No press releases. No panic tweets. Just complete silence. Arkham discovered that LuBian had tried to reach out to the attacker using OP_RETURN messages. That’s right—they spent 1.4 BTC to send 1,516 messages through the blockchain.
The messages weren’t random spam. They were direct attempts to recover funds, begging the attacker to return the Bitcoin.
A Bruteforce Exploit
Arkham believes the hack wasn’t a random exploit. LuBian had reportedly been using an algorithm to create private keys. That algorithm turned out to be weak—and brute-forceable. The hacker used this flaw to generate the keys and clean out the wallets.
Now, four years later, the hacker still holds the BTC. In fact, based on Arkham’s data, this anonymous whale is the 13th biggest Bitcoin holder in the world. They even hold more than the Mt. Gox hacker.
