Bybit’s CEO, Ben Zhou, just posted on X today, March 4, 2025, and man, it’s not good news. He said almost 20% of the $1.46 billion that hackers stole from Bybit two weeks ago—around $200 million—is now untraceable.
That’s a gut punch, especially since this hack on February 21 was the biggest crypto theft ever, and people thought they could track most of it. Zhou’s update says 77% of the funds are still traceable, but that other chunk’s slipped away, probably thanks to crypto mixing services like ExCH that scrub the trail clean.
The hack itself was wild—North Korea-backed hackers, likely the Lazarus Group, hit Bybit hard, pulling off this crazy sophisticated attack. They mostly used THORChain, this cross-chain thing, to swap the stolen Ethereum into Bitcoin. Zhou’s numbers show 83% of it—about $1 billion—got turned into BTC across 6,954 wallets, but THORChain’s got some heat on it. I read on crypto.news that while other protocols tried to stop the stolen funds, THORChain’s validators basically said no to a freeze proposal, and one of their big contributors, Pluto, quit over it. Of the stolen stuff, 72% ($900 million) still shows up through THORChain, but it’s a messy path.
The mixing services are the real problem here—Zhou said 16% of the funds, or 79,655 ETH (about $160 million), got lost in ExCH, and another $65 million’s stuck because they’re waiting on OKX’s Web3 wallet for more info. It’s frustrating, right? He’s mentioned before that over half the stolen ETH’s already been laundered, mostly through THORChain, which saw its trading volume spike to $2.91 billion in five days after the hack. That’s a lot of dirty money moving fast.
