Whale Alert Reports Large ETH Withdrawals from Bybit

Whale Alert, a leading blockchain tracker monitoring significant cryptocurrency transactions, identified multiple large ETH withdrawals from the Bybit exchange.

Recent Bybit Hack

Bybit has gained notoriety for a massive hack that resulted in the loss of over $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum to the North Korean hacker group, Lazarus Group.

120,000 ETH Withdrawals

Whale Alert detected four consecutive withdrawals, each transferring 30,000 ETH, amounting to a total of 120,000 ETH valued at approximately $241.82 million. These transactions were directed to wallets marked as anonymous by the blockchain tracker, but it was later revealed that they were internal transfers back to Bybit.

> 🚨 🚨 🚨 30,000 #ETH ($60,501,389) transferred from #Bybit to unknown wallet source
> — Whale Alert (@whale_alert) March 20, 2025

CEO’s Statement on Stolen Funds

Ben Zhou, Bybit’s CEO, released a summary detailing the funds stolen by Lazarus Group during a February 21 exploit of an Ethereum smart contract. The attack resulted in the loss of approximately 500,000 ETH.

Zhou mentioned that 88.87% of the stolen crypto is traceable, while 7.59% is now untraceable, and 3.54% has been frozen due to quick action from exchanges.

> Bybit BEN: Hackers utilized a BTC mixer for funds transfer. Out of the $1.4 billion (around 500k ETH) in stolen funds, 88.87% remain traceable, 7.59% are untraceable, and 3.54% are frozen. 86.29% of the stolen crypto (about 440k ETH) has been converted into…
> — Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) March 20, 2025

Zhou noted that 86.29% of the stolen Ethereum (approximately 440,000 ETH) has been converted to Bitcoin—12,836 BTC—and distributed across nearly 10,000 wallets.

Bybit’s current challenge is to analyze the transactions made through mixers like Wasabi, CryptoMixer, Railgun, and TornadoCash, used by the hackers for fund distribution.

Bounty Program

In efforts to recover the stolen ETH, Bybit announced a bounty program, receiving 5,012 reports over the past month, of which only 63 were validated. Bybit intends to reward 10% of the stolen funds to those assisting in the retrieval of the stolen crypto.