Bybit has already paid more than $4 million to bounty hunters who helped trace and freeze some of the stolen funds.

According to Bybit's holdings, that amounts to $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency that was stolen from Bybit and its customers, making this the largest ever cryptocurrency theft. However, as Molly White of Web3IsGoingGreat points out, the hacker can't exactly cash out $1.5 billion in Ethereum, because an amount that high would crash the value of ETH.

Bybit, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, experienced a hack Friday in which over $1.4 billion worth of crypto was stolen, according to blockchain-analytics firms. It’s the latest incident for an industry struggling with security concerns that present hurdles to mainstream adoption.

North Korea is behind the massive crypto hack, according to several blockchain monitoring firms and a well-known researcher

The Lazarus Group, a cybercrime syndicate linked to North Korea, has long been a thorn in the side of the crypto industry. Since 2017, the group has stolen over $6 billion in digital assets, funneling the proceeds into the country’s ballistic missile program. The Bybit heist alone accounts for nearly a quarter of that total.

Less than 72 hours later, Zhou said Bybit had restored the exchange’s balance and kept customer withdrawals open, although he did not account for the stolen crypto. The scale of the Bybit theft surpasses the previous record of a $615 million heist of Ethereum and U.

Bybit CEO Ben Zhou announced that the exchange has fully recovered its Ethereum (ETH) reserves following a massive $1.5 billion exploit on February 21. He confirmed that a new audited Proof of Reserves (POR) report will soon be released to prove that client assets are once again backed 1:1.

After exchange operator loses ether from a cold wallet in a North Korea-linked attack, bitcoin and ether fall as industry enthusiasm wanes.

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