Crypto Stumbles After $1.4B Bybit Hack, Despite Strategy's $2B Bitcoin Buy

Crypto continued to sell off Monday despite hacked crypto exchange Bybit claiming it's nearly out of the woods after suffering a record $1.4 billion hack at the hands of North Korea's notorious Lazarus Group.

In fact, even another $2 billion Bitcoin buy from Michael Saylor's Strategy failed to lift market sentiment, and CoinShares revealed the second-consecutive week of outflows for crypto investment products. Here's the news you need to know this week in crypto (as spotlighted in our usual Monday News Recap above.)

Crypto Notches $508 in Outflows

According to the official weekly CoinShares tally, another $508 million in net outflows hit crypto investment products last week. That's the second-consecutive week of outflows after more than three months worth of weekly inflows.

Despite that, Michael Saylor's company Strategy fired up another $2 billion purchase of Bitcoin. He announced the company bought 20,356 BTC for $1.99 billion at an average price of around $97,514 per Bitcoin. Bitcoin continued its slide even after the announcement, falling below $95,000 on Monday.

Bybit Says It Plugged Its $1.4B Hack

The world's second-largest crypto exchange claims to have plugged the $1.4 billion hole it faced after hackers drained one of its wallets of more than 401,000 ethereum tokens and staked ether on Friday. Over the weekend, Bybit was able to secure various bridge loans of ETH to meet withdrawals as the exchange suffered from billions of dollars being taken off the platform.

"Bybit has already fully closed the ETH gap, new audited POR report will be published very soon to show that Bybit is again Back to 100% 1:1 on client assets..." Bybit CEO Ben Zhou shared on X Sunday.

Ethereum has fallen about 5% since the hack. After $72 million was drained from Bitfinex in 2016, Bitcoin slid 20%. Relatively, it's an interesting comparison nearly a decade later with a hack about 20x the size.

Meanwhile, onchain sleuths like Arkham Intelligence were busy tracking all the funds as they were laundered and transferred in real-time:

Ye Token Launch Triggers Blowback

Ye has been teasing a token launch for a week and has attracted attention from various people in the space. Binance founder was even messaging Ye over the weekend in a presumed attempt to get him to launch his coin on Binance's chain. Then, as Ye continued to tweet sporadically over the weekend, there were allegations swirling that he had sold his X account entirely. Coinage could not independently verify any of that.

But as details of the project to be launched by the self-described Nazi emerge, Coinage launched a vote to weigh boycotting coverage of the Ye token altogether. CoinTelegraph's managing editor shared a message on X echoing a similar call to action for other media outlets to not cover the launch.

Centralized exchanges are likely to face similar questions around whether or not they choose to list a token that could have just as much attention as tokens launched by President Trump or President Milei over the last few weeks. The eyes of crypto at Coinage will be watching.

ETH Denver Kicks Off

Ethereum's annual Denver conference is kicking off this week and Coinage is on the ground. We'll be bringing you the latest news within the Ethereum ecosystem and updates on everything we're hearing since the big wartime pivot.

Coinage's Zack Guzman will also be presenting onstage with Story Protocol co-founder Jason Zhao on all things decentralized media. Stay tuned for more from the conference!

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