Arkham Uncovers $14.5B Hack

Alpha Team
August 05, 2025

Historic $3.5B Bitcoin Theft Uncovered

Hack Revelation: Arkham has revealed the largest cryptocurrency heist in history, involving the theft of 127,426 BTC from the Chinese mining pool LuBian.com in December 2020. At the time, the stolen Bitcoin was valued at $3.5 billion, but its current value stands at $14.5 billion. LuBian controlled approximately 6% of Bitcoin's total hash-rate as of May 2020. Neither LuBian nor the hackers have publicly acknowledged the incident, making Arkham the first to report on it. This discovery highlights the scale of the breach, leading into the specific sequence of events that unfolded.

Event Sequence: The hack began on December 28, 2020, when hackers stole over 90% of LuBian's Bitcoin holdings. The following day, December 29, they extracted an additional $6 million in BTC and USDT. By December 31, LuBian transferred their remaining funds to recovery wallets. In response, LuBian broadcast messages via OP_RETURN transactions, stating: "MSG from LB. To the whitehat who is saving our asset, you can contact us." They spent 1.4 BTC across 1516 such transactions to communicate this. These actions set the stage for understanding the ongoing status of the involved parties.

Present Holdings: The vulnerability stemmed from a brute-force attack on a susceptible key generation algorithm used by LuBian. Currently, LuBian holds 11,886 BTC, valued at $1.35 billion. The hacker retains possession of the stolen Bitcoin, with the last movement occurring in July 2024, positioning them as the 13th largest BTC holder. Users can track the hacker's wallet and LuBian's activities on the Arkham platform. Read More.

️ On today's Top Picks:

🛑 Base experiences temporary halt due to unsafe head delay.
🪂 Succinct launches $PROVE TGE & airdrop claim.
🪂 Towns launches $TOWNS TGE & airdrop claim.
💰 Coinbase $COIN to raise $2B via private offering.

Read time: ⏰ 5 minutes

Crypto News

• US CFTC launches Crypto Spring, an initiative to actualize recommendations from the recent digital asset report from President Trump’s working group.

• ⭐️ Coinbase's $COIN Base experiences temporary halt due to "unsafe head delay"; the network has since been restored.

• Solana $SOL Mobile begins shipping Seekers; over 150K units were pre-ordered.

• Lido $LDO lays off 15% of workforce for "long-term sustainability"; adds, "This decision was about costs — not performance."

• Digital Asset Investment Products saw ~$223M in outflows last week; Bitcoin $BTC ~$404M outflows, Ethereum $ETH ~$134M inflows, Solana $SOL ~$9M inflows, Ripple $XRP ~$31M inflows.

Alpha

• Camp Network posts, "Act 3 Incentivized Summit Series loading," on X; to potentially launch TGE & airdrop soon.

• Alpen launches Public Testnet; Alpen recently raised $8.5M in Strategic funding led by Cyber Fund & DBA.

• Noble Points Season 1 ends as Season 2 begins; Season 1 depositors earn 2x points in Season 2; 5% of $NOBLE supply allocated to Season 1 points holders.

• Re launches Re Points; hold reUSD and/or reUSDe to earn points daily.

• Boundless launches Mainnet Beta Diamond Tier; complete onchain & social tasks to get whitelisted for the Boundless token sale plus bonus token rewards.

• TEN announces $TEN tokenomics; 6% of TEN supply is allocated for Community Rewards.

Airdrops

• ⭐️ Succinct launches $PROVE TGE & airdrop claim; Succinct community members, open-source developers, & more are eligible.

• ⭐️ Towns launches $TOWNS TGE & airdrop claim; Towns users with activity between June 7th, 2024 & July 10th, 2025 are potentially eligible.

• SatLayer launches $SLAY airdrop registration; SatLayer rewards program participants, SatLayer community members, & more are eligible.

• INFINIT announces $IN airdrop details; INFINIT Stones holders, INFINIT Discord contributors, & more are eligible; claim on August 7th.

• ICYMI Airdrop, Checkers, & Points (July 28th) by Olimpio.

Finance News

• $1.1 Trillion added to the US stock market today; $1.1 Trillion was wiped out from the US stock market last Friday amid weak jobs data.

• EU delays planned US tariffs for 6 months to allow for trade talks with President Trump.

• ⭐️ Coinbase $COIN to raise $2B via private offering of convertible notes; to use proceeds for general corporate purposes.

• Metaplanet $3350.T buys an additional 463 Bitcoin $BTC for ~$53.7M at $115,895 per BTC; now holds 17,595 BTC worth ~$2B.

• Bitmine $BMNR increases Ethereum $ETH holdings to 833,137 ETH worth ~$3B; now the largest ETH Treasury in the world.

• Sharplink buys an additional 83,561 Ethereum $ETH for $264.5M at $3,634 per ETH; now holds 521,939 ETH worth ~$1.9B.

• DeFi Dev Corp $DFDV buys an additional 110,466 Solana $SOL for $18.4M at ~$166.61 per SOL; now holds 1,293,562 SOL worth ~$216M.

• Upexi $UPXI increases Solana $SOL holdings to ~2M SOL worth ~$328M; raised $200M in July.

• Ark Invest $ARKK $ARKW $ARKF buys $29.8M of Coinbase $COIN; also buys $11.6M of Bitmine $BMNR.

• Tesla $TSLA board approves to award ~$30B worth of TSLA shares to Elon Musk; award approved amid ongoing Delaware litigation, forfeits if 2018 award is reinstated.

• Key Events This Week by The Kobeissi Letter.

Security and Exploits

• ⭐️ Arkham uncovers 127,426 Bitcoin $BTC (~$14.4M) heist from Lubian, a Chinese mining pool, in 2020; attacker may have exploited a vulnerability in the algorithm LuBian used to generate its private keys.

• CrediX exploited for ~$4.5M due to compromised admin wallet; team says, "All users funds will be recovered in full within 24-48 hours."

• Google releases Android security updates patching multiple security vulnerabilities; includes two Qualcomm flaws being actively exploited in the wild.

Token Unlocks

• Ethena $ENA / ~$101M / AUG 05th
• Immutable $IMX / ~$12M / AUG 08th
• Movement $MOVE / ~$6M / AUG 09th
Sourced from Tokenomist

Funding

• OpenMind raises $20M in funding led by Pantera Capital.

• Stan raises $8M in funding from several investors.

• Triv raises an undisclosed amount in Strategic funding from MEXC Ventures.

The Degen Farmer

Top stablecoin yield farms of the day, more than $3,000,000 in TVL. DYOR and step up your farming game!

PROTOCOL	ASSETS	APY
Hyperion (Aptos)	USDTUSDC	51.80%
Aerodrome Slipstream (Base)	EURCUSDC	48.84%
Merkl (Ethereum)	KPDUSDC	35.00%
Peapods Finance (Ethereum)	USDC	29.26%
Tapp Exchange (Aptos)	USDTUSDC	26.95%
Convex Finance (Ethereum)	DEUSDUSDC	22.43%
Uniswap V3 (Ethereum)	USDEUSDT	21.41%

. . .

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That’s it for today’s edition! See you soon.

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