Bybit’s centralized cryptocurrency exchange is struggling with the withdrawals that have been made following an early-Friday hack in which over $1.4 Billion worth of Ethereum, and other assets were stolen.
Ben Zhou, co-founder of Bybit and its CEO in a video live stream following the incident said the company has taken the necessary steps to ensure that it does not happen again. "experienced massive withdrawals in the last two hours."
Zhou said that it would work through pending withdrawal requests within a week. Zhou promised viewers the firm would complete all pending withdrawals within "a few hours," There are no plans for the company to stop accepting withdrawals.
Data from CoinGecko shows that Bybit has seen over $8 billion in spot trading volume over the last 24 hours—a nearly 46% spike over the last day. Chart shows the volume spike that followed the announcement of the hack.
Zhou stated that Bybit would rather obtain Ethereum through the market than buy it to compensate customers.
The CEO added that the team still doesn't know how exactly hackers managed to make away with the crypto—despite it being held in cold, multi-signature wallets—but said that it was possible thieves managed to hack the UI of all signers' computers.
In order to use a multi-signature wallet, several users must sign off a particular transaction with their hardware wallet. Zhou added that the Safe brand, which is behind Ethereum Multi-Sig wallets, could have also been targeted.
"I'm just saying all the possibilities, not accusing people—it could be that the Safe server was hacked," Zhao said.
Safe tweeted that the company had "not found evidence that the official Safe frontend was compromised."
Zhou had previously written on X, that Bybit was capable. "cover the loss" Even if the funds are not recovered by law enforcement. Zhou stated that stolen funds represented approximately 1/20th of Bybit’s total assets.
Editor's note: This story is breaking and will be updated with additional details.
