Source: Cailianshe Silicon Valley NEWS

Last week, Bybit, the world's second largest cryptocurrency exchange, was hacked, and a total of US$1.46 billion of Ether was stolen, setting a record of a single token theft in history. The highest record of the case.

It is reported that the theft seems to be related to the hacker group Lazarus Group, which has controlled the wallet of Bybit on Ethereum and transferred the tokens to an unknown address.

However, Bybit is not in a mess. Its co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou said that even if the losses caused by this hack cannot be recovered, Bybit has the ability to repay, and all customers' assets are supported 1:1, so Bybit can make up for the related losses.

Zhou said Bybit has $20 billion in reserve assets and is able to make up for any unrecovered funds on its own or through partners’ loans.

According to the official announcement, Bybit has launched the "Borrow Recovery Program" to issue a call to elites in the field of global cybersecurity and encryption analysis to jointly track down the "culprits" of the largest theft case in cryptocurrency history. Contributors who successfully recover funds will receive a 10% reward, with the total bounty calculated based on the verifiable recoverable amount of stolen ETH worth more than $1.4 billion at the time of the event. If all the funds are recovered, the total bounty may be as high as US$140 million (approximately RMB 1.015 billion).

Bybit has more than 60 million customers worldwide and is the second largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world with trading volume. Ether's price has fallen by more than 4% since news of the hack last Friday, but has now almost recovered to its previous level.

On Monday, Ben Zhou pointed out that Bybit has completely compensated for the stolen $1.4 billion Ether loss. According to blockchain company Lookonchain, Bybit has obtained 446,870 Ether coins from loans, large holders and other channels, worth $1.23 billion.

In addition, after the hacking incident, Bybit welcomed a large number of customers who requested withdrawal of funds. Ben Zhou said there were more than 350,000 requests for withdrawal of funds. Bybit's customer withdrawals have exceeded $5.3 billion as of last Saturday.

At present, Bybit's reserves are still healthy and there is no liquidity risk.

Although Bybit has not been devastated, the theft still makes the entire industry feel wary. Binance co-founder Zhao Changpeng emphasized that exchanges that are hacked have different multi-signature solution providers, which means that hackers use not to target a single supplier, but to a systemic problem.

Economic executives recommend increasing transaction disclosure in the crypto industry, moving from traditional multi-signatures to a safer architecture. Meanwhile, Bybit's rapid practice of stabilizing investor sentiment has also been praised.