Did Ethereum’s Design Enable The Bybit Hack? Experts Clash

The colossal $1.5 billion hack of Bybit last week has set off fierce discussions across the crypto community, with some industry voices contending that Ethereum’s design might have played a role. The theft of approximately 401,000 Ether (ETH)— orchestrated by the North Korean Lazarus Group—has raised questions about whether Ethereum’s complexity makes its ecosystem uniquely vulnerable to sophisticated exploits, or if the blame rests elsewhere.

The hack reportedly took place during a standard transfer from Bybit’s cold wallet to a warm wallet. According to the exchange’s official statement on X, the transaction “was manipulated through a sophisticated attack that masked the signing interface,” which displayed the correct address but altered the underlying smart contract logic. This manipulation allowed the attackers to wrest control of the cold wallet and shift the funds into a private address.

Some in the crypto space have proposed rolling back the blockchain to recover the stolen funds, drawing parallels to the 2016 DAO hack rollback. Proponents argue this could restore trust and deter future large-scale attacks. However, core developer Tim Beiko quickly dismissed such ideas as “technically intractable,” warning that tampering with the ledger could undermine the blockchain’s core promise of immutability.

Is Ethereum To Blame?

Among those voicing concerns about Ethereum’s role in the exploit is Alexander Leishman, founder of River Financial and a former teaching assistant for Stanford’s CS251 cryptocurrency class. He suggested that Ethereum’s expansive “attack surface” might have facilitated the attackers’ efforts.

Leishman noted via X: “The ETH attack surface is massive. Scary stuff. I would love to see somebody break down exactly what happened here […] The ByBit hack reminds me of when I was a TA for the cryptocurrency class (CS251) at Stanford. The final exam had a question asking students to find 8 purposefully placed bugs in an ETH contract. The students found 15.”

He also drew comparisons with Bitcoin’s simpler UTXO model, explaining that when signing a Bitcoin transaction, one merely verifies the state transition, which is typically clear on a hardware wallet screen. In contrast, ETH signatures can include not just fund transfers but also commands to invoke complex smart contract logic.

He stated: “It absolutely has something to do with Ethereum […] In Ethereum you are signing off on fund movement AND a command to send a smart contract (which could lead to further fund movement) – a VERY error prone UX. ETH transactions don’t represent the state transition, they represent the command triggering the state transition.”

Not everyone agrees that Ethereum’s inherent design deserves scrutiny. Toghrul Maharramov, a researcher at Fluent, insisted that the exploit “has nothing to do with Ethereum or EVM,” suggesting it was purely a platform-agnostic hack and that focusing on the blockchain itself distracts from more pertinent security lapses.

Meanwhile, Anthony Sassano, an independent ETH educator and founder of The Daily Gwei, was more pointed in his rebuttal, suggesting that the Bybit hack “had nothing to do with a bug in an Ethereum smart contract.” He dismissed any correlation between Ethereum’s architecture and the exchange’s breach, reflecting a broader sentiment that the real weaknesses lay in Bybit’s operational security and wallet management practices.

Leishman later clarified that he never claimed the Bybit hack stemmed from a direct bug in the Ethereum code itself. “Wow the eth podcasters are sensitive. Nowhere did I say the Bybit hack was the result of a smart contract bug. I was sharing an entertaining anecdote about how Ethereum’s complexity leads to difficult to catch security issues,” he wrote.

Instead, his core argument revolves around the difficulty of verifying a transaction’s ultimate impact when Ethereum smart contracts are involved. The Bybit hack was the result of Ethereum’s ‘smart’ contract model making it very difficult to verify the state transition the signed transaction(s) from the multisig contract was going to trigger. It is much safer when the transaction IS the state transition,” Leishman concluded.

At press time, ETH traded at $2,705.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com