- 127,426 BTC stolen from LuBian Mining Pool in late 2020—worth $14.5B today.
- On-chain messages from LuBian begged the hacker to return funds.
- The stolen BTC has barely moved in almost four years. Still no ID on the attacker.
Turns out one of the biggest Bitcoin thefts in history might’ve flown completely under the radar. According to new intel from Arkham, a crypto wallet tied to a low-profile Chinese mining pool—LuBian—was quietly drained of 127,426 BTC back in December 2020. That’s over $3.5 billion at the time. No headlines, no statements. Just… vanished.
And nobody talked about it. Until now.
The Hack That (Somehow) No One Knew About
Arkham dropped a thread on August 2 that’s got folks talking. Their team says they’ve connected the dots between this massive outflow and LuBian—a mining pool that, back in 2020, controlled nearly 6% of Bitcoin’s hash rate. So yeah, not exactly small fries.
On December 28, 2020, LuBian’s wallet got wrecked. Over 90% of their BTC disappeared. Gone. Two days later, another breach happened—$6M in BTC and USDT, traced back to an address running on Bitcoin’s Omni layer. Things just kept spiraling.
By December 31, whatever coins were left—roughly 11,886 BTC—were shoved into recovery wallets. But by then, most of the treasure was long gone.
They Even Tried Messaging the Hacker on the Blockchain
Here’s where it gets weird. Arkham found that LuBian actually tried talking to the hacker. They used something called OP_RETURN messages—basically notes written onto the Bitcoin blockchain—to beg the attacker to return the coins. In total, they spent 1.4 BTC on over 1,500 of these messages.
That’s not normal behavior for a scammer trying to fake a hack. It strongly suggests the original wallet owner was desperate and legit.
Arkham suspects LuBian may’ve messed up their key generation process—probably something weak in the way private keys were created, which left them vulnerable to brute-force cracking. If true, that’s a brutal way to lose billions.
The Coins Are Still Out There… Sitting Quietly
Since then? Crickets. Most of the stolen BTC has barely moved, aside from one wallet shuffle in July 2024. But now, thanks to BTC’s price surge, the loot is worth around $14.5 billion. That makes this mystery wallet the 13th biggest BTC holder ever recorded. Bigger than even Mt. Gox’s hacked stash.
Arkham has set up trackers for both the suspected hacker wallet and what’s left of LuBian’s stash. As of now, no names have been confirmed. No one’s been caught. And no coins have come home.
If this really is the biggest Bitcoin heist in history, it’s also the quietest. And that’s… kinda eerie.
