North Korea’s notorious cybercrime syndicate, the Lazarus Group, has successfully laundered the entirety of the 499,000 ETH stolen in the recent Bybit hack, amounting to approximately $1.39 billion, in just ten days, according to on-chain analyst EmberCN.
According to a March 4 post on X by on-chain analyst EmberCN, Tracking the movement of the stolen funds revealed that a significant portion of the Ethereum was funnelled through THORChain. This decentralized cross-chain liquidity protocol was converted into Bitcoin.
THORChain has processed $605 million in transactions in the past 24 hours, but has faced criticism for facilitating illicit financial flows, handling $5.9 billion in volume and collecting $5.5 million in fees during the process. Some blockchain protocols acted to stop stolen funds, while THORChain validators did not. A governance proposal to suspend ETH transactions was rejected, resulting in the resignation of core contributor Pluto in protest. Critics describe the platform’s response as negligent or greedy.
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou has provided updates on the status of the stolen assets revealing that 77% are traceable, 20% are untraceable, and 3% are frozen. He stated that 83% of the laundered funds were converted into Bitcoin, distributed across 6,954 wallets. Notably, $900 million (72%) of the laundered funds passed through THORChain before moving to ExCH, where 16% became untraceable. An additional 8% ($100 million) was processed via the OKX Web3 Proxy.
Notably, Bybit has launched Lazarusbounty.com, a fund-tracking platform that offers bounties for recovering stolen assets following a major theft. The initiative has distributed $2.17 million to 11 bounty hunters, with significant contributions from Mantle, Paraswap, and blockchain investigator ZachXBT.
Despite facing one of the largest crypto hacks in history, Bybit is working towards securing a full operational license in the UAE despite experiencing a significant crypto hack. On February 27, the exchange announced it received in-principle approval from the UAE’s Securities and Commodities Authority to operate as a virtual asset platform.
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