Were the 127,000 Bitcoin seized by U.S. agents actually criminal proceeds, or did they originate from the LuBian mining pool?
Summary
- Chinese mining pool LuBian started operations in the spring of 2020 and soon became the sixth-largest mining pool in the world. In February 2021, it ceased operation.
- Only in 2025, Arkham Intelligence found out that in December 2020, 127,272 BTC was stolen from the mining pool. This amount stood for 90% of all LuBian’s bitcoins.
- Later, the Department of Justice claimed these bitcoins were forfeited from the Cambodia-based forced-labor operation Price Group.
- In January 2025, Donald Trump vowed that the U.S. would never sell its bitcoins. According to Arkham Intelligence, the U.S. currently holds 326,588 BTC, including 127,272 BTC claimed by China.
Claims coming from China
In a report, amplified by Global Times and PANews, CVERC accuses the U.S. government of orchestrating a 2020 theft of over 127,000 bitcoins from the LuBian mining pool.
At the current price, these bitcoins cost over $13.1 billion, dwarfing the Bybit $1.5 billion heist conducted in March 2025. At the time of hacking, in December 2020, the stolen BTC cost over $3.5 billion, still more than in a record-breaking Bybit hack.
Until June 2024, the funds were kept intact on the attacker addresses for four years before getting sent to the U.S.-controlled addresses. PANews sees it as a pattern typical of state-backed heists. Chinese media Global Times claims that CVERC called the case a typical quarrel of thieves. Allegedly, it was the U.S. that stole the funds in 2020.
The hack itself was discovered by Arkham Intelligence back in August 2025. More than that, it was known that the “stolen” assets ended up in the BTC wallets controlled by the U.S. government. However, CVERC was the first to claim that these bitcoins were lawfully mined by LuBian and then stolen by the U.S.-supported hackers.
Prior to China’s accusation, a crypto sleuth, ZachXBT, alleged that someone hacked LuBian “for USG.”
The U.S., however, has a strikingly different account of what happened.
The DOJ report
Earlier, in October 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice claimed that the entity behind the hack is a criminal organization called Prince Group, headed by Chen Zhi.
According to the DOJ, Price Group was involved in a wire fraud conspiracy and human trafficking. In a press release, the DOJ accused Prince Group of scamming residents of the U.S. and other countries through a “pig butchering” fraud scheme.
The DOJ indictment directly names LuBian as one of the money laundering operations used by Prince Group. According to the report, only 30% of the funds on LuBian addresses originated from Bitcoin mining.
According to CVERC, preliminary findings contradicted the illegal origins of LuBian’s Bitcoin.
The chain of events
The LuBian Bitcoin seizure timeline may seem confusing, as the reports of the events were lagging by years. Here’s the chain of events in chronological order:
April 2020: The LuBian mining pool mines the first bitcoins.
May 2020: LuBain gains a 6% share of the world’s hashrate.
December 28, 2020: An unidentified hacker steals over 127,000 bitcoins from LuBian using brute force.
July 3, 2022: Someone (probably the LuBian rep) sent a portion of BTC to the alleged attacker’s address. Using the OP_RETURN, the sender attached a text message begging the receiving party to return funds and discuss a possible reward. Several similar messages were sent in 2021–2024.
Each hacker address received the OP_RETURN message, shown in the screenshots, in which LuBian asks the hacker to return their funds.
LuBian spent 1.4 BTC across 1516 different transactions to send these messages, which suggests that this is not a spoof from another hacker who… pic.twitter.com/HW1P6Fanjw
— Arkham (@arkham) August 2, 2025
August 2023: The vulnerabilities in the addresses used by LuBian were mentioned by the Milky Sad researchers.
April 2024: Milky Sad claims that LuBian’s private keys were created via a pseudo-random number generator. The keys are so weak that it could take a gaming computer to brute force them in a matter of a few days.
June 2024: The “stolen” funds move to a new address, where most of them stay to this day.
October 14, 2025: The DOJ files criminal charges against Chen Zhi and Price Group and claims to conduct the biggest forfeiture in history. The U.S. reveals it seized over 127,000 BTC from Prince Group.
November 9, 2025: China accuses the U.S. of conducting a state-level theft of LuBian’s bitcoins.
Do these bitcoins belong to the U.S.?
As soon as the DOJ released the statement about the forfeiture of 127,000 BTC, various crypto influencers added this amount to the 198,000 BTC that the U.S. allegedly held at that time. The amount of 326,000 BTC aligns with the findings of Arkham Intelligence (and is mostly based on them).
Given that there are no publicly available official figures or an audit of the U.S. holdings, Arkham’s evaluation circulates as the most precise data capturing the amount of BTC stored by the U.S.
However, while Trump banned the U.S. from selling its bitcoins, seized assets usually originate from crimes, and the DOJ may recommend that the government return these funds to the victims.
The DOJ already recommended returning 94,000 BTC stolen from Bitfinex to the exchange. The DOJ press release cites Attorney Generals Pamela Bondi and Todd Blanche saying that “the United States will use every tool at its disposal to defend victims, recover stolen assets.”
It means that while the U.S. is probably holding 326,000 bitcoins, these coins could change their holders in the future, even despite the intention to withhold from selling Bitcoin.
