Bybit pitches $140m bounty for those who help round up its stolen crypto

Bybit offers security experts $140 million.
Kaito AI airdrops its token to 85,000 wallets.
Ethena raises $100 million.

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Bybit offers bounty

Crypto exchange Bybit is offering up to $140 million to onchain sleuths who help track down the $1.4 billion the exchange lost in Friday’s hack.

Those who play an active role in the recovery of portions of the stolen funds stand to receive 10% as a reward.

“We want to officially reward our community who lent us their expertise, experience and support,” Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit, said in a statement.

On Friday, a hacker drained $1.4 billion worth of Ether and staked Ether tokens from one of Bybit’s crypto wallets. It’s the biggest hack in the industry’s history.

DefiLlama hacks — Friday’s Bybit hack is the biggest single theft in crypto history. (DefiLlama)

Post-hack bounty programmes have become common practice.

Often, they are aimed at the attackers themselves, encouraging them to return stolen funds in exchange for a smaller amount of “clean” funds.

But the Bybit hack was likely conducted by North Korea, making a return of funds unlikely.

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Yet, crypto security experts who help recover funds by tracking, locating, and freezing portions of the $1.4 billion could earn millions doing so.

Some funds have already been recovered.

Mudit Gupta, Polygon’s chief security officer, said on Saturday that Security Alliance, a group of crypto security experts, had helped recover 15,000 cmETH — Mantle’s Ether liquid staking token — worth around $43 million.

The same day, Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said his firm had frozen $181,000 worth of its USDT stablecoin connected to the Bybit hack.

Kaito AI’s airdrop

X users are cashing in on Kaito AI’s newly-launched token.

The crypto intelligence platform, which monitors social chatter to provide insights, gave out 10% of its Kaito governance token through an airdrop on Thursday.

Over 85,000 wallets got the airdrop, with the biggest accounts receiving over $100,000 worth of tokens each, according to Nansen data.

Ahead of the airdrop, those who signed up to the platform and participated in crypto discussions on X could earn tokens representative of their contributions.

The Kaito token is currently up over 28% from its launch price, per CoinGecko data.

In recent years, many newly-launched crypto tokens have struggled to hold their value.

A September report from crypto market maker Keyrock found that in 2024, 88% of tokens launched alongside airdrops declined in price, with most crashing within 15 days.

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Berachain’s BERA token slid 60% days after it launched on February 6.

Whether Kaito can buck this trend remains to be seen — the token has only been trading for five days.

Ethena’s $100m raise

Ethena, the DeFi app behind the USDe dollar-pegged token, has raised $100 million through a token sale to VC firms, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

In December, the protocol finalised a deal which sold ENA tokens for $0.40 each to Franklin Templeton, F-Prime Capital, Dragonfly Capital Partners, Polychain Capital, and Pantera Capital.

At the time, ENA traded between $0.90 and $1.10. It has since fallen in value and now trades around $0.40.

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A version of this article appeared in our The Decentralised...A version of this article appeared in our The Decentralised newsletter on December 17. Sign up here.

Ethena’s USDe is created by depositing Bitcoin, Ether, or Solana to the Ethena protocol, which then opens shorts, or bearish bets, on futures exchanges like Bybit.

This creates a neutral position where the value of the assets and the short cancel each other out to remain at a stable price in aggregate.

This is different to Circle and Tether’s stablecoins, which are backed at a one-to-one ratio by dollars or dollar-equivalent assets like US Treasury bonds.

Ethena’s dollar token has proven popular with DeFi users. There’s almost $6 billion USDe in circulation, making it the third-biggest dollar-pegged crypto.

In January, Guy Young, Ethena’s founder, said the platform planned to roll out a new version of USDe tailored for regulated financial institutions.