Strangely sturdy
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 24th February 2025.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
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What’s up
Major Coins Steady After Monumental Theft
Bitcoin's flat and Ethereum is down only slightly as the industry collects itself in the aftermath of what's being called the biggest crypto theft in history.
This past Friday, Bybit said hackers stole 401,000 ETH worth nearly $1.5 billion. The heist took place during a routine cold-to-warm wallet transfer. Blockchain investigators ZachXBT and Arkham linked the hack to Lazarus Group, a notorious North Korean gang of cybercriminals.
Come Saturday morning, the Dubai-based exchange revealed it had been besieged by user withdrawal requests but that they'd been met, and the company had sufficient reserves to survive the incident. With time not on its side and billions exiting the door, Bybit CEO Ben Zhou posted an "all hands on deck" plea on X, urging support from users while also announcing Safe wallet functionalities were being temporarily suspended.
“We know the cause is definitely around the Safe cold wallet," Zhou said.
The exchange quickly secured a loan and snap-developed new software to access frozen funds, according to CoinDesk.
Calls over the weekend for a special one-time rollback of the Ethereum chain — the crypto equivalent of Superman reversing the earth's rotation to bend time to save Lois Lane — was actually being discussed as a potential remedy.
As of this morning, Bybit had returned to a 1:1 backing of client assets and fully staunched the gaping ETH gash. On-chain tracking service Lookonchain said the exchange received 446,870 ETH, worth $1.2B through loans, large deposits and purchases over the past two days. All deposit and withdrawal activity had “fully recovered to normal levels," Bybit declared last night.
Word of the unsettling event spread across the cryptosphere right as BTC was creeping toward the coveted $100,000 mark amidst a market-wide realization that regulatory climate change is real.
After the hack, BTC plunged to as low as $94,900 but it since rebounded to about $96,000. The world's foremost digital asset hasn't budged in over a day. It hasn't really moved in two weeks.
As for ETH, it fell from $2,800 to $2,600 in the aftermath of the theft only to shoot back up to $2,800 during a flurry of emergency buying activity yesterday.
What's down
It's A Shame About RAY
Checking ETH this morning, the second-largest crypto still looked surprisingly sturdy as it hugged $2,700, down 4% since this time yesterday.
Among Big Ten coins, Solana (SOL) endured the worst decline as it dipped below $160. SOL lost 6.5% in 24 hours as of 8:15 a.m. (EST).
Hackers apparently turned to Solana-based token launchpad Pump.fun to launder stolen Bybit funds via a strategy of memecoin deployment. But the Pump.fun team spotted the sketchy activity and shut it down, sparking a warm round of applause from Bybit (TheCryptoBasic).
Bybit CEO Ben Zhou said on X that the exchange is "overwhelmed" by all the support. And although this hack is obviously a terrible event, he added, "through this hard time our industry showed strength as we unite together."
Less supported, however, is Solana-based DEX Raydium which saw its native RAY plummet 27% in the past 24 hours following reports that Pump.fun appears to be testing out its own automated market maker (AMM) functionality, which could siphon trading volumes away from Raydium (The Block) .
What's next
Regulatory Pivot Commences
Lost in the fallout from the largest crypto heist ever was the revelation that the SEC plans to put an end to one of the industry's most monumental enforcement lawsuits. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on Friday announced the regulator was dropping the case.
"It's a huge signal to the market that the regulatory pivot about which we've been hearing is actually going to happen," said Bitwise senior crypto research analyst Ryan Rasmussen. The analyst told Yahoo Finance he's "excited" as "we enter this next phase of growth, of mainstream adoption and playing by the rules."
In another sign that the pivot is on, the SEC has decided to close the investigation of NFT marketplace OpenSea, suggesting, says the Cryptonomist, a possible softening of the regulator's stance towards the NFT industry. This past summer, the SEC put OpenSea on notice it intended to initiate legal action against the platform for allegedly operating as an unregistered securities market.
