$3.5B Bitcoin heist from 2020 retroactively uncovered — Arkham Intel

Key Points

1. LuBian, the sixth-largest BTC mining pool at the time, was hacked on December 28, 2020, losing 127,426 Bitcoin (worth $3.5 billion then, now ~$14.5 billion).

2. The hack went unreported for years, with 90% of the pool's BTC stolen and only 11,886 BTC recovered.

3. LuBian embedded OP_RETURN messages in 1,516 transactions to hacker wallets, costing ~1.4 BTC, possibly to track or communicate with the hacker.

4. Arkham suggested the pool's private key generation algorithm was vulnerable to brute-force attacks, which hackers likely exploited.

5. The LuBian hack surpasses other major crypto heists, such as the $1.5 billion ByBit hack in February, attributed to a compromised SafeWallet developer's AWS tokens.