Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, February 27th, and today we are digging into the

By-Bit hack. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go

subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the

conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or

get to bit.ly slash Breakdown Pod. All right, friends, as promised, we are back today with an episode all about this big

by-bit hack, the biggest exchange hack in crypto history, and we're going to be joined by Charles

Guillaume, the CTO of Ledger. Now, Ledger is, of course, the sponsor of this show right now.

And for those of you who think that that's too big a conflict of interest, I will see you tomorrow. Totally appreciate it.

But to be clear, this is not a sponsored episode.

It came out of the fact that in the wake of Bybit, I saw a thread from Charles that actually

dug deep into some of the technical specifics of this hack, which I think is really pertinent

and interesting.

So, as you know, I was traveling this week and I sent a set of questions to Charles and the Ledger team, and what you're going to hear is a self-recording of the answers to those

questions.

First, though, for those of you who haven't been paying close attention, which I can't

imagine what percentage of you that is, let me do a little bit of background.

The TLDR is that at the end of last week, Bybit was hit by the biggest hack in crypto history, and likely the largest theft of any kind.

On Friday, North Korean hackers, the Lazarus Group stole over $1.4 billion from Bybit.

Most troublingly, the funds were stolen from the Bybit Cold Wallet, which is supposed to be firewalled from making external transactions.

Lazarus Group managed to drain the entire ETH cold wallet, including various stable coins

...