Big Day for Crypto Goes South in a Hurry After a Giant Hack

Hours after Coinbase said the S.E.C. was dropping a lawsuit against it, another major cryptocurrency exchange reported a potentially record-setting theft.

The good news for cryptocurrency investors arrived just after 8 a.m. on Friday: Coinbase, the largest crypto marketplace in the United States, had reached a deal with U.S. regulators to dismiss a lawsuit that had hung over the industry for years.

But within hours, the crypto market descended into a new crisis. At 10:51 a.m., Bybit, another leading crypto exchange, said it had been hacked — with industry analysts estimating the loss at nearly $1.5 billion, the largest theft in crypto history.

The prices of Bitcoin, Ether and other major cryptocurrencies plunged. Even Coinbase’s share price had dropped 8 percent by the end of the day.

This split-screen contrast was a telling illustration of the state of crypto in 2025. Even as President Trump embraces the industry, it remains the wild West of the financial world, prone to scams, thefts and sudden market meltdowns.

A series of policy changes in Washington are poised to encourage millions of investors to dabble in crypto for the first time, despite the industry’s continued struggles to police and prevent criminal activity. The hack was a reminder that, for all its growing influence in politics, crypto remains something of an international free-for-all — a chaotic market in which even the most experienced investors sometimes suffer extreme losses.

“These guys whose whole business is crypto, being smart about these issues, just lost $1.5 billion,” said Corey Frayer, who worked on crypto policy at the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Biden administration. “So how do we expect regular Americans who just want their debit card to work to safely use the products?”