Well Done: Bybit Restored Its Liquidity Within 30 Days After the Hack

Bybit restored its liquidity within 30 days after the hack, showing incomparably better results than the aftermath of the SEC lawsuit against Binance.US in 2023, which has still not recovered after losing 80% of its liquidity.

Specifically, by the end of March 2025, the 1% market depth for BTC on Bybit had fully recovered to $13 million per day, while the average price slippage for BTC-USDT on Bybit for simulated $50K and $100K sell orders decreased by 60%, reaching 0.003% and 0.006%, respectively — below early March levels and lower than on HTX and KuCoin.

A Record-Breaking Hack and a Record-Breaking Recovery by Bybit

Let us recall that the hack of Bybit turned out to be the largest in the entire history of the crypto industry, amounting to $1.5 billion. However, we have already examined in detail whether this can even be called a hack of Bybit, considering that the vulnerability was in the signing interface of the third-party service SAFE, and we have also discussed why Bybit remains one of the most advanced and secure crypto platforms in the industry.

At the same time, it became a well-known fact that the $1.5B loss did not affect users, and Bybit covered it independently, as well as with the support of partners, literally within a few days. But this was not their only success, and according to the report, Bybit can boast that it had already restored liquidity on the platform just 30 days after the hack.

For comparison, even such an industry leader as Binance.US has still not recovered 80% of its liquidity following the SEC lawsuit in 2023, and that’s not to mention the similar case of the Bitfinex hack in 2016.

Score Up to $30,050 on Bybit – Just for Trading

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Speaking in more detail about the methods and indicators of the recovery, by the end of March 2025 the 1% market depth for BTC on Bybit had fully recovered to the level of $13 million per day, and improvements were observed across all levels of the order book — from 0.1% to 8% of the mid-price — ensuring high execution speed and minimal slippage for traders.

The report also places additional emphasis on the fact that the Retail Price Improvement (RPI) mechanism played a significant role in stabilizing liquidity, having been launched on the eve of the attack — February 20. Its feature lies in the fact that these are orders placed by institutional market makers, available only to retail traders executing trades manually through the Bybit user interface. RPI orders are not available to algorithmic strategies and API, which made it possible to protect retail participants from competition with high-frequency bots. In March, their share in the order book noticeably increased, contributing to narrower spreads and higher market depth.

For a full overview of Bybit’s features and functionality — and to see how well the platform aligns with your trading goals and requirements — take a look at our in-depth Bybit review.

The average price slippage for BTC-USDT on Bybit for simulated sell orders of $50K and $100K decreased by 60% compared to the beginning of the month and amounted to 0.003% and 0.006%, respectively — below early March levels and even lower than competitors such as HTX and KuCoin. At the same time, this applies not only to Bitcoin: a decrease was recorded for TRUMP-USDT (down to 0.06%) and XRP-USDT (down to 0.02%) — with the average impact per trade not exceeding $20. Bid-ask spreads also narrowed across most assets: for example, TRUMP showed the greatest improvement of -9 bps since listing, DOGE and XRP improved by 0.7 bps and 0.2 bps, while BTC and ETH remained stable with a change of about 0.001 bps for the quarter.

Conclusion

Overall, for key assets, spreads on Bybit were comparable to those on such industry leaders as Binance and OKX, and for more volatile tokens — better than on HTX. And let us not forget that the market experienced an overall decline in volumes in March due to a mass shift of investors into risk-off mode amid tightening U.S. trade policy. However, unlike other platforms such as HTX, Bithumb, and MEXC, where liquidity dropped by 10–20%, Bybit showed a 30% increase in market depth since the attack.

As you can see, the recovery of Bybit is no less historic than the incident itself, and such indicators of resilience are rightfully impressive. Of course, this does not mean that the Bybit team should relax — on the contrary, they need to continue improving the security of the platform in the same spirit. Nevertheless, they have undoubtedly earned a positive assessment for how they handled such a difficult situation.