Uncovered historic BTC heist might be behind shutdown of bitcoin mining pool

Blockchain analysts claim they have uncovered "the largest ever" bitcoin heist. In 2020, billions of USD worth of bitcoin (BTC) were stolen from a now-closed mining pool. The victims, a Chinese mining pool, are still trying to recover the stolen funds.

Arkham Intelligence said they've discovered that a Chinese mining pool, LuBian, lost 127,426 BTC in a hack in December 2020. At the time, this amount was worth around $3.5 billion, while today's value is $14.6 billion. Until now, there haven't been any confirmations from either LuBian or the criminals behind the hack that the funds were stolen.

However, the mining pool, once among the largest, with facilities in China and Iran, shut down soon after the alleged hack.

Meanwhile, according to Arkham, LuBian lost most of its funds in two hacks. On December 28th, 2020, 90% of its BTC was stolen, while another $6 million worth of BTC and tether (USDT) stablecoin was taken the next day. Two days later, the company moved its remaining funds to recovery wallets. Analysts said that the team still holds 11,886 BTC ($1.36 billion).

Analysts have suggested that the hackers possibly exploited a vulnerability related to LuBian's decision to use an algorithm to generate private keys "that was susceptible to brute-force attacks."

Also, according to Arkham's data, the hacker still holds the stolen funds in BTC addresses. Their last known movement was a wallet consolidation in July 2024.

Therefore, it seems like LuBian's team, at least until July 2024, was still trying to recover the stolen funds and was sending messages via the bitcoin blockchain to the hacker, calling them "the whitehat who is saving our asset" and asking the owner of the BTC address to contact the team and discuss "the return of asset and your reward."

"LuBian spent 1.4 BTC across 1,516 different transactions to send these messages, which suggests that this is not a spoof from another hacker who has brute-forced the private keys," the analysts said.

Per Arkham data, in 2020, the mining pool had almost 6% of the bitcoin hashrate, or computational power of the network.