- In December 2020, LuBian lost 127,426 BTC, which is currently worth 14.5B
- LuBian controlled 6% of Bitcoin’s network hash rate
- An untouched Hacker wallet, today the 13th largest holder of Bitcoin
Another case of the Bitcoin robbery that has remained unknown until recently happened back in December 2020, and it is the biggest crypto heist on record. A mining pool in China called LuBian was the unfortunate target of a brazen theft of over 127,000 Bitcoins, which were worth approximately $3.5 billion at the time. Now worth an eye-watering 14.5 billion dollars.
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This unprecedented theft went undisclosed publicly until now. According to data provided by an on-chain analytics company, Arkham Intelligence, it took almost five years before both LuBian and the hacker admitted that a breach had occurred.
LuBian’s Hidden Crypto Catastrophe
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In the year 2020, LuBian was a formidable mining pool that employed mining farms in China and Iran. Despite this, it held nearly six percent of the total Bitcoin cryptocurrency market.
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On December 28, 2020, hackers took advantage of a weakness associated with the poor generation of the private keys. In a single attack, they siphoned off more than 90 percent of the BTC in the hands of LuBian.
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Exactly 48 hours afterward, another six million worth of Bitcoin and USDT vanished from a LuBian wallet linked to the Bitcoin Omni network.. At the close of the month, LuBian transferred its remaining funds, approximately 11,886 BTC valued at 1.35 billion dollars now, to recovery wallets.
The interesting part in this case is the way LuBian tried to get back the money in a desperate and very public manner.1,516 Bitcoin transactions were processed by the mining pool, which boosted the total quantity of Bitcoin to 1.4. These included OP_RETURN messages that were a direct plea to the hacker by the owner of the stolen assets to return the stolen assets. This attempt is a very strong indication that the hack is legitimate and is not a mere spoof or another attacker having obtained the keys.
The Silent Holder: A Crypto Giant in the Shadows
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The stolen funds have not been liquidated or moved in large amounts because the last time it was done was in July 2024. This hibernating position has brought the hacker to be the 13th largest owner of Bitcoin in the world, surpassing other notorious owners like the Mt. Gox hacker.
It has been reported that this wallet still holds all the stolen BTC, costing 14.5 billion dollars as per the data provided by Arkham Intelligence.
The significant weakness that the hacker appears to have exploited is the error made in the generation of the private keys by LuBian. It raises the concern of disturbing the security of the primitive mining system and ancient crypto mining.
This heist is by far the largest of all other mega-hacks like the 2025 breach of Bybit that stole 1.5 billion, shifting the discourse on the need to take crypto security precautions, and the risks and vulnerabilities.
