LuBian.

LuBian, from the Chinese 路边 (“roadside”), was a little-known Chinese mining poolMining poolA group of miners who share the work of finding blocks and split the rewards, so each gets paid steadily instead of rarely.. It found its first block, 627,441, on 24 April 2020, and within three weeks it was sixth on BTC.com’s list of pools, with almost 6% of Bitcoin’s mining power, the news site 8btc reported. One of its founders, Liu Ping, told 8btc that LuBian mined inside a power station in Iran and had machines in Sichuan, China. He said its four partners controlled all its computing power and that its purpose was “only mining and accumulating Bitcoin”. Its blocks were tagged “Buffett” at first and “lubian.com” from 10 May 2020. The last, 672,636, came on 1 March 2021, and no announcement that it had closed has been found.

Each LuBian block paid its whole reward to one LuBian address. That reward is separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. From April to December 2020 about 11,116 new bitcoin went to its main address, which by December held about 14,139 bitcoin, US prosecutors later said.

On 2 August 2025 the blockchainBlockchainBitcoin's shared record of every payment since 2009, stored in blocks that each link to the one before — which is what makes it a chain. analysis firm Arkham Intelligence reported that about 127,426 bitcoin, then worth $3.5 billion, appeared to have been stolen from LuBian in December 2020, most of it on 28 December. Nobody had reported it before. Arkham suggested that LuBian made its private keysPrivate keyThe secret number that lets you spend your bitcoin. Whoever knows it controls the coins, so it must never be shared., the secret numbers that control bitcoin, in a way a computer could crack by trying possibilities. LuBian never announced the loss, but in July 2022 and July 2024 it wrote messages into Bitcoin transactions sent to the addresses holding the coins. They were addressed “To the whitehat who is saving our asset”, a whitehat being a well-meaning hacker, and offered a reward.

On 14 October 2025 the US Department of Justice charged Chen Zhi, chairman of Cambodia’s Prince Group, with running scam compounds where people were forced to work. It also asked a court to forfeit about 127,271 bitcoin that it said was in US custody, its largest forfeiture case ever. Prosecutors allege that Chen and his associates paid for LuBian with money from scam victims, so that it produced “clean bitcoin”, and that LuBian’s addresses were among those that held the coins.

The analysis firm Elliptic found that the coins were the ones taken from LuBian, though it said it was unclear who took them, whether it was really a theft, and how they reached US custody. LuBian, which calls itself a collective of software engineers, says it is not a “corporate alter ego” of Chen, and has claimed a share of the coins as the victim of the 2020 theft. Chen and many others have claimed them too. When this profile was reviewed, the court had not decided who owns them.