Bitcoin Dominance Surges After $1.4B Ethereum Hack on Bybit

Bitcoin's dominance has surged following a significant hack on the Bybit exchange, with prominent figures in the cryptocurrency community weighing in on the incident. Adam Back, a cypherpunk, Satoshi Nakamoto ally, and Blockstream CEO, took to his X account to comment on the hack, which saw an enormous $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum drained from the trading platform.

Analysts have suggested that the infamous Lazarus hacker group based in North Korea was behind the attack on Bybit. Back, a prominent Bitcoin advocate, seized the opportunity to criticize Ethereum and its EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) technology, describing it as "complex, fragile, blind-signed, and un-securable." He also pointed out that hackers have been draining billions of dollars from Ethereum annually for several years.

Back's former colleague, Samson Mow, now the CEO of JAN3, tagged Vitalik Buterin, proposing that he should roll back the Ethereum chain and hard-fork it to prevent the stolen ETH from being sold and used to fund North Korea's nuclear program. Mow reminded the community that Ethereum had previously faced a hard fork in 2016 following the DAO hack, resulting in the creation of Ethereum Classic (ETC) and Ethereum (ETH).

In response to the hack, major exchanges such as Binance, Bitget, and MEXC have provided loans to Bybit to support its liquidity, totaling approximately 114,500 ETH and 12,652 stETH. Binance CEO Richart Teng and the former CEO CZ expressed their support for Bybit on Twitter.

Bybit CEO and co-founder Ben Zhou announced that the hackers have begun laundering the stolen Ethereum by converting it into Bitcoin via Chainflip. Zhou also revealed that Bybit plans to launch a bounty program, encouraging the community to help block or trace the funds to facilitate their recovery.

The @lookonchain analytics account suggested that Bybit was likely exploited by the same culprits who targeted the Phemex exchange for $69 million at the end of January.