The $1.44 billion ETH outflow to Bybit caused Ethereum to drop to $2,850.

Following the incident, Bybit’s CEO claimed that the exchange had received bridge funding to cope with rising withdrawals.

ETH must break its range-bound trend with RSI and MACD above the neutral level.

ETH fell to $2,850 on Friday after cryptocurrency exchange Bybit revealed that an attacker hacked one of its wallets and stole $1.44 billion.

The crypto world was expecting Bybit to buy a large amount of ETH to meet withdrawals, but CEO Ben Zhou said the exchange would use bridge loans.

Ethereum drops after Bybit hack.

After cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced that one of its ETH cold wallets was hacked for $1.44 billion, Ethereum fell 6% from $2,850.

The hacker stole 401,347 ETH (~$1.12B), 90,376 stETH (~$253.16M), 15,000 cmETH (~$44.13M), and 8,000 mETH (~$23M).

According to Coinglass, the Ethereum hack has caused $136.35 million in ETH futures liquidations in 24 hours. Liquidations of long and short positions were $66.35 million and $70 million.

ETH was on track to regain $2,900 before the Bybit attack, led by a 250K ETH increase in open interest (OI) to 8.90M ETH. Its OI fell to 8.60M ETH.

In derivatives markets, open interest is the number of unsettled contracts. Increases in OI imply that more traders are initiating positions, while decreases suggest the opposite.

To recover from the theft, many predicted that Bybit would acquire ETH to compensate consumers and boost prices.

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou said on an X livestream that the exchange would employ bridge loans to enable customer withdrawals, not ETH.

"For the immediate good, we are currently reaching out to our partners to give us a bridge loan," Zhou said. "We are not buying Ethereum. And even if we wanted to buy, it's too much to move."

"In fact, we already secured almost 80% of the Ethereum that has been stolen as a bridge loan to give us that liquidity, to help us with the liquidity crisis, so that we can get through this crucial period," Zhou said.

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