Bitcoin Price Crashes on Reports of Alleged $1.5B Bybit Security Incident

Several reports emerged in the past minutes that one of the world’s leading crypto exchanges, Bybit, was compromised for roughly $1.5 billion in digital assets.

Although the news is yet to be officially confirmed, the panic spread rapidly, causing an immediate price crash for BTC and most altcoins.

Seems that @Bybit_Official hot wallet just got hacked.

Though, it’s a multi-sign $1.5B worth of $ETH was withdrawn to the new address and is currently being sold

More info below https://t.co/Xa3GHGDkvu pic.twitter.com/GEYYUicl26

— Finish (@0xFinish) February 21, 2025

The first suspicion came after Whale Alert reported a massive transfer from Bybit to an unknown wallet for over 400,000 ETH (worth more than $1.1 billion). After a few more transfers to the same wallet, in total worth around $1.5 billion, mostly in ETH, the receiver started to swap the assets to stETH and mETH, according to Finish.

The most well-known crypto on-chain sleuth, ZachXBT, also highlighted the development on his Telegram account, indicating that his sources had confirmed ‘it’s a security incident.’

As of press time, Bybit has not addressed the issue. However, the damage has already been done to the crypto market as prices headed south immediately after the reports went live.

Bitcoin’s price had approached $100,000 after a steady increase over the past few days but crashed immediately by more than two grand. Most altcoins suffered even more painful declines, and the total crypto market cap dropped by $70 billion in less than half an hour.

UPDATE:

Bybit’s CEO recently posted an update explaining the events that took place. By essentially confirming the hack, he noted that the exchange had tried to make an internal transfer between its cold and hot wallets, but a bad actor took control and transferred all the ETH to an unidentified address.

However, Ben Zhou said all withdrawals are operational as only one exchange wallet had been compromised.

Bybit ETH multisig cold wallet just made a transfer to our warm wallet about 1 hr ago. It appears that this specific transaction was musked, all the signers saw the musked UI which showed the correct address and the URL was from @safe . However the signing message was to change…

— Ben Zhou (@benbybit) February 21, 2025

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