How @arkham discovered the largest theft in the world, $3.5 billion heist.

There was a Chinese mining pool called Lubian that was mining bitcoin in China and Iraq in 2020, but suddenly they stopped operating.

The food that was done on-chain data shows that approximately #BTC of 127,426 were stolen, which was worth $3.5 billion dollars at that time, and now it is worth approximately $14.8 billion dollars, almost 5x.

Despite the type of currency involved in the hacking, no one among them reported the hacking; both the Lubian and the hacker have kept silent, only now that Arkham has uncovered this.

Lubian was one of the major #Bitcoin mining pools in the world in 2020, at that time controlling 6% of the bitcoin hash rate.

As the authorities indicated, their hacking occurred on December 28th, 2020. Where over 90% of their bitcoin was stolen, and then the hacker further stole $6M of USDT and BTC on December 29th, 2020. Then on December 31st, they transferred the remaining funds to recovery wallets.

Lubian paid 1.4 BTC to send an OP_RETURN message, in order to negotiate with the hacker and offer a bounty to return the stolen BTC. Overall, the address of this hacker is 1516, which confirms that it was Lubian who sent this message and not someone else trying to impersonate them.

The reason they were hacked is that Lubian uses an algorithm to generate their private key, which led to their brute-force attack (. Brute-force is when combinations of the private key are tried until they are exhausted; this does not mean they will do it manually, no. Their system will do it automatically until it is exhausted, which takes a lot of time ).

Currently, this hacker is ranked 13th among the highest number of Bitcoin holders, and the last time they moved their assets was back in July 2024; it seems they have diamond hands.

This is why it has become the largest theft ever recorded in the world, including the one that Lazarus Group carried out earlier this year amounting to $1.5 billion.

Do you think this hacker who stole these funds will be able to return them to Lubian in order to claim the bounty?

Please share your thoughts in the comment section 👇👇

Al-ameen 09/08/2025