The theft was made in December 2020, according to Arkham’s data.
The amount extracted from the pool amounts to 127,426 Bitcoin (BTC).
The Ochain Arkham Intelligence analysis firm revealed that in December 2020 a mass robbery of 127,426 Bitcoin (BTC) of the Chinese mining pool Lubian was perpetrated, for a value of 3.5 billion dollars at that time, qualifying it as the “greatest robbery of history”.
At the moment, The stolen funds are equivalent to about 14.5 billion dollars due to the increase in the price of Bitcoin In the last five years. According to Arkham explainedneither Lubian nor the alleged hacker have publicly recognized the incident, this being the first time that the case is announced.
Arkham’s analysis details that Lubian, who operated facilities in China and Iran and controlled almost 6% of the Hash Red Bitcoin in May 2020. On December 28, 2020 he suffered his first attack, losing more than 90% of its BTC.
The next day, on December 29, the attackers extracted additional $ 6 million in BTC and the USDT stablecoin from an active direction of Lubian in Bitcoin Omni Layer. By December 31, Lubian moved its remaining 11,886 BTC, valued today at 1,350 million dollars, to recovery wallets, a mechanism that involves moving funds to safe addresses to protect them from future attacks.
In addition, Lubian tried to contact the hacker through OP_RETURN messages, a Bitcoin network function that allows small data in transactions to be included. In these messages, The pool requested the return of the funds. Arkham points out that Lubian spent 1.4 BTC in 1,516 transactions to send these messageswhose amount and cost could indicate the veracity of these messages and that were not falsified by another attacker.
The vulnerability that allowed theft, according to Arkham, It could be related to a weak algorithm used by Lubian To generate their private keys, susceptible to brute force attacks. Although pool, so far, has not given statements about it.
For its part, the hacker still retains the stolen BTC, with its last activity recorded in July 2024, when it consolidated its funds on new Wallets.
With a current value of 14,500 million dollars, this robbery positions Lubian’s hacker as the thirteenth BTC holder, according to Arkham.
Before this incident, the most significant theft was that of Exchange Bybit in February 2025, with 401,346 ETH stolen, equivalent to 1.4 billion dollars at the current price, from a cold Wallet with multifirma capacity, as cryptootic reports. Prior to Bybit, in 2022, Ronin Chain suffered an exploit attack that resulted in the loss of 173,600 ETH, with a current value of 600 million dollars.
