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Wang Yishi, founder of OneKey, a manufacturer of hardware crypto wallets, believes that the BlackRock Bitcoin fund—the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT)—could be the next major target for North Korean hackers. According to him, following the recent Binance hack, the attackers will most likely shift their attention to other large concentrations of crypto assets.
The IBIT fund manages approximately 815,000 bitcoins with a total value of about $ 63 billion. The primary custodian of these assets is the U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase. It is precisely this concentration of funds with a single provider that makes the fund a particularly attractive target, Wang Yishi emphasizes.
To steal cryptocurrency, hackers do not necessarily need direct access to wallet private keys. They can attack the transaction signing infrastructure or exploit the privileges of employees and internal services responsible for transferring funds.
According to estimates by the founder of OneKey, if hackers steal $ 6 billion worth of Bitcoin—as happened with Binance—the IBIT fund would lose about 9.5% of its assets, which corresponds to approximately $ 4 per share. A separate risk is limited insurance coverage: BlackRock does not insure IBIT’s Bitcoin separately, and Coinbase’s insurance amounts to only $ 320 million and covers all of the company’s clients, not just the fund’s assets.
If the stolen bitcoins cannot be recovered and the payouts from the custodian and insurers prove insufficient, the remaining losses could significantly impact the value of IBIT shares. Wang Yishi also highlighted a fundamental difference between Bitcoin and most stablecoins: stolen coins cannot be frozen by a decision from a centralized issuer.
According to the entrepreneur, the growing volume of Bitcoin under the management of large funds will force hacker groups to increasingly focus on vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of custodial services.
Earlier, analysts at TRM Labs identified the North Korean group TraderTraitor as the likely organizer of the attack on Binance, linking it to previous operations by hackers from North Korea.