Cryptocurrency intelligence platform Arkham has uncovered the largest Bitcoin theft in history, which has never been publicly disclosed.
Arkham's analysis of on-chain data revealed that 127,426 BTC were stolen from a China-based mining pool called LuBian in December 2020. This amount was worth approximately $3.5 billion at the time, and its current value is approximately $14.5 billion.
LuBian was a large mining pool with facilities in China and Iran that controlled approximately 6% of the global Bitcoin network as of 2020. However, it appears to have lost more than 90% of its BTC holdings in the attack that occurred on December 28, 2020.
In the following days, approximately $6 million worth of BTC and USDT was stolen from a LuBian address active on the Bitcoin Omni layer on December 29. On December 31, LuBian moved his remaining assets to recovery wallets.
Neither LuBian nor the hacker has publicly acknowledged the incident to date, so Arkham's research marks the first documented case of this massive attack.
Following the attack, LuBian sent OP_RETURN messages to the hacker addresses, demanding the return of the stolen BTC. These messages were transmitted in 1,516 separate transactions, totaling 1.4 BTC. Experts believe this intensive effort undermines claims that another hacker obtained the private keys through brute-force.
Research indicates that LuBian used weak algorithms in private key generation, which may have paved the way for the attack.
LuBian managed to preserve the remaining 11,886 BTC (currently worth approximately $1.35 billion) from the attack. However, the 127,426 stolen BTC remain under the hacker's control. The last movement of these wallets was recorded as a consolidation transaction in July 2024.
The LuBian attack, with a volume of $3.5 billion at the time of the transfer, became the largest cryptocurrency theft ever recorded. Today, the attacker holds $14.5 billion in BTC, making him the 13th largest Bitcoin holder in the world, according to Arkham data, ahead of even the Mt. Gox hacker.
*This is not investment advice.
