Ben Zhou, the co-founder of crypto exchange Bybit, recently revealed that a massive 88% of the total $1.5 billion in stolen funds during the Bybit hack in Feb 2025, are still traceable. He added that blockchain investigators have continued with their efforts to trace, freeze, and recover the stolen funds.
Last month, hackers managed to breach popular crypto exchange Bybit stealing a massive $1.5 billion in user funds from the platform. The platform lost a majority of the funds in liquid-staked Ether (stETH), Mantle Staked ETH (mETH) and other cryptocurrencies.
Early investigative reports from different blockchain analytics platforms like Arkham Intelligence point to North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group behind the Bybit hack. However, the hackers haven’t been very successful in eliminating the traceability of funds by using crypto mixers or other methods.
Bybit co-founder Ben Zhou stated that 88% of the stolen $1.5 billion funds from the Bybit hack, still remain traceable.
Bybit Hack: Efforts Continue to Recover Large Part of Stolen Funds
This recent update from Ben Zhou comes a month after the Byit hack. Within 10 days, the Lazarus Group managed to launder the entirety of the stolen Bybit funds through the decentralized cross-chain protocol THORChain.
However, blockchain security experts still remain optimistic that some of the stolen funds could still be frozen and recovered by the exchange. But Bybit CEO admitted that the most challenging part in tracing these funds has been decoding transaction patterns through different crypto mixers.
Over the past 30 days, Bybit received 5,012 bounty reports, with 63 being valid. The exchange is seeking more bounty hunters who can help decode the mixers for future recovery efforts.
The crypto exchange has been rewarding handsomely to different bounty hunters. So far, Bybit has distributed $2.2 million in rewards to 12 bounty hunters in return for providing important information that could help in freezing the stolen funds.
The exchange is also offering white hat hackers and investigators a bounty of 10% on any successfully recovered funds as an additional incentive.
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Bhushan is a FinTech enthusiast and holds a good flair in understanding financial markets. His interest in economics and finance draw his attention towards the new emerging Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency markets. He is continuously in a learning process and keeps himself motivated by sharing his acquired knowledge. In free time he reads thriller fictions novels and sometimes explore his culinary skills.
