Bybit Begins Awarding Bounties for Tracing and Freezing Stolen Crypto

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has awarded a collective bounty of $4.2 million to five bounty hunters that have helped trace and freeze funds that were stolen from the exchange in a hack.

Bybit is offering a total bounty of $140 million, which is equal to 10% of the $1.4 billion that was taken in the hack, according to the company’s website called Lazarusbounty that provides information on the hack and the bounty.

“Join us on war against Lazarus,” Bybit Co-Founder and CEO Ben Zhou said in a Wednesday (Feb. 25) post on X announcing the site and referring to the hacker, Lazarus. “Industry first bounty site that shows aggregated full transparency on the sanctioned Lazarus money laundering activities.”

The site said that bounties will be awarded immediately when funds are confirmed as frozen, and that there will be bounties of 5% of the recovered funds to the entity that froze the funds and 5% to contributors who helped trace the funds.

The site also ranks involved parties like exchangers, mixers or bridges, dubbing them “good actors” or “bad actors” based on their response time and cooperation in either freezing the funds or providing updates on the funds’ movement.

“We have assigned a team to dedicate to maintain and update this website, we will not stop until Lazarus or bad actors in the industry is eliminated,” Zhou wrote in his post. “In the future we will open it up to other victims of Lazarus as well.”

Bybit said Friday (Feb. 21) that a cyberattacker stole some of its holdings, adding that the attacker was able to transfer these holdings to an unidentified address after gaining control of one of Bybit’s ethereum (ETH) cold wallets when it was executing a transfer to one of its warm wallets.

On Monday (Feb. 24), Bybit said it had replenished its reserve after the hack, conducting a fresh audit and restoring its reserve to a 1:1 ratio within 72 hours of the incident.

The attack showed that as the blockchain ecosystem grows, security challenges become more complex, PYMNTS reported Wednesday, noting that the attack was described as being likely the “largest incident ever, not just crypto.”