In celebratory social media posts, industry executives declared the end of a “siege against crypto” by the federal government.
The
euphoria didn’t last long. Bybit, which is based in Dubai and processes
tens of billions of dollars in daily transactions, revealed that
thieves had breached its system, stealing huge quantities of Ether.
Crypto has a long history of damaging hacks, but the theft from Bybit dwarfed the previous record, when thieves stole $611 million in cryptocurrencies from a platform called PolyNetwork in 2021.
Even
outside the crypto world, there is little precedent for a theft so big.
“It may even be the largest single theft of all time,” said Tom
Robinson, a co-founder of Elliptic, a crypto analysis firm.
On social media, Bybit’s chief executive, Ben Zhou, assured customers that the company was still solvent. “Even if this hack loss is not recovered, all of clients assets are 1 to 1 backed,” he wrote. “We can cover the loss.”
Big Day for Crypto Goes South in a Hurry After a Giant Hack
Hours after Coinbase said the S.E.C. was dropping a lawsuit against it, another major cryptocurrency exchange reported a potentially record-setting theft.
Bybit, run by Ben Zhou, shown speaking at a conference in December, said it had been hit by a billion-dollar theft. Credit...Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times
Reporting from San Francisco
The
good news for cryptocurrency investors arrived just after 8 a.m. on
Friday: Coinbase, the largest crypto marketplace in the United States,
had reached a deal with U.S. regulators to dismiss a lawsuit that had hung over the industry for years.
But within hours, the crypto market descended into a new crisis. At 10:51 a.m., Bybit, another leading crypto exchange, said it had been hacked — with industry analysts estimating the loss at nearly $1.5 billion, the largest theft in crypto history.
- The prices of Bitcoin, Ether and other major cryptocurrencies plunged.
- Even Coinbase’s share price had dropped 8 percent by the end of the day.
This
split-screen contrast was a telling illustration of the state of crypto
in 2025. Even as President Trump embraces the industry, it remains the
wild West of the financial world, prone to scams, thefts and sudden
market meltdowns. . .
[>>>] The news about Coinbase and Bybit came at
the end of a roller-coaster few days in the crypto world.
- A proliferation of new memecoins — digital currencies based on an internet joke or a celebrity mascot, with no practical function — has prompted widespread complaints about scams.
- Last week, a memecoin promoted by the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, suddenly plummeted in value, setting off a political crisis there and costing investors more than $250 million.
- Recently, crypto executives have expressed worry about the spread of these high-risk cryptocurrencies, fretting that they could undo some of the progress the industry has made with lawmakers. Shortly before his inauguration, Mr. Trump put his own memecoin on sale — it shot up in value before crashing. More than 800,000 crypto accounts lost money.
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