Bybit Intercepts Over $700 Million in Potential User Losses in First Half of 2026
Singapore – August 18, 2026 – Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit announced today that it has intercepted more than $700 million in potential user losses between January 1 and June 15 of this year. The company revealed in a risk and security report that it blocked over 30,000 suspicious withdrawal requests, thereby protecting close to 20,000 users.
This figure represents a significant increase compared to the $300 million intercepted throughout the entirety of 2025. At that time, Bybit had implemented a new AI-driven risk framework. In 2025, Bybit also reported blocking approximately 3 million credential-stuffing attempts, with its recovery efforts benefiting around 4,000 users.
Bybit cautioned that these metrics should not be interpreted as a guarantee of future performance or as a means to rank exchanges.
Cybersecurity in the Age of Minutes
“The cybersecurity arms race has entered an era of minutes,” stated David Zong, Head of Group Risk Control and Security at Bybit. He emphasized that despite advancements, human judgment remains “at the center of critical security decisions.”
The exchange reported that AI-assisted auditing identified high-severity vulnerabilities at a rate three to five times higher than manual review. Furthermore, automation has drastically reduced the time from security assessment to testing, from approximately two weeks down to just two hours.
An automated red-team platform assessed 1,489 public-facing assets, flagging over 100 high-severity vulnerabilities. The time from discovery to the first penetration test has been reduced to under 24 hours. Bybit also processed more than 100,000 alerts with AI assistance. The platform’s monitoring now encompasses 100% of business-relevant on-chain activity, including listed token contracts and the exchange’s cold, warm, and hot wallets. Initial risk reviews now average 4.7 minutes, with 95% completed within 10 minutes.
Handling Incidents and Asset Recovery
Bybit stated it handled 10 incidents involving listed token projects without incurring any platform losses. The exchange completed emergency responses ahead of other major exchanges in eight of these cases and detected two incidents before the affected projects themselves.
This announcement follows Bybit’s recent legal action. On August 8, the company announced it had secured a preliminary injunction freezing identified stolen assets after suing North Korea, its Reconnaissance General Bureau, and the Lazarus Group in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. To date, Bybit has recovered approximately $48.4 million and frozen over $30.5 million across more than 28 exchanges and custodians.
“Our focus has never changed: protect our users first, recover what we can, and make sure the people behind these attacks are held accountable,” said Ben Zhou, Co-founder and CEO of Bybit.
In February 2025, attackers reportedly drained roughly $1.46 billion, according to Bybit’s assessment, after compromising a cold wallet signing process. The FBI attributed this theft to the Lazarus Group, which US agencies valued at $1.5 billion and traced to over 41,000 ETH.
Industry-wide, security firm Blockaid reported that $1.1 billion was stolen across 212 incidents in the first half of 2026.
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