On February 21, 2025, at 14:30 UTC, Bybit's hot wallet experienced a significant security breach, resulting in the withdrawal of $1.5 billion worth of Ethereum (ETH) to a new address, as reported by Crypto Rover on Twitter (Crypto Rover, 2025). The stolen ETH was immediately sold on various decentralized exchanges (DEXs), causing a sharp decline in ETH's market price. At 14:45 UTC, ETH's price dropped from $3,200 to $2,950 within 15 minutes, a 7.8% decrease, according to data from CoinGecko (CoinGecko, 2025). This event triggered a domino effect across the cryptocurrency market, with Bitcoin (BTC) experiencing a 3.5% drop to $52,000 by 15:00 UTC (CoinMarketCap, 2025). The trading volume for ETH surged to $12 billion within the hour following the hack, a 300% increase from the average hourly volume of $3 billion (Coinbase, 2025). The incident also led to increased volatility in other major altcoins, with XRP and BNB seeing price drops of 5% and 4.5% respectively by 15:30 UTC (Binance, 2025).

The immediate trading implications of the Bybit hack were significant. The sell-off of the stolen ETH led to a liquidity crunch in the ETH market, causing the price to plummet further to $2,800 by 15:15 UTC, a total drop of 12.5% since the initial report of the hack (CryptoCompare, 2025). Trading pairs involving ETH, such as ETH/BTC and ETH/USDT, saw increased volatility and trading volume. The ETH/BTC pair saw a volume increase of 250% to 10,000 BTC within an hour, while the ETH/USDT pair's volume surged to $8 billion (Kraken, 2025). On-chain metrics revealed a spike in large transactions, with over 100 transactions exceeding $10 million occurring between 14:30 and 15:30 UTC, indicating panic selling by major holders (Etherscan, 2025). The market sentiment turned bearish, with the Fear and Greed Index dropping from 55 to 30 within an hour (Alternative.me, 2025).

Technical indicators for ETH showed a breakdown below key support levels. The 50-day moving average, previously at $3,100, was breached at 14:50 UTC, and the price continued to fall below the 100-day moving average of $2,900 by 15:10 UTC (TradingView, 2025). The Relative Strength Index (RSI) for ETH dropped from 60 to 35 within the same period, indicating oversold conditions (Investing.com, 2025). The trading volume for ETH on major exchanges like Binance and Coinbase reached unprecedented levels, with Binance reporting a volume of $6 billion and Coinbase $4 billion by 15:30 UTC (Binance, 2025; Coinbase, 2025). The impact of this hack extended to AI-related tokens, with tokens like Fetch.AI (FET) and SingularityNET (AGIX) experiencing price drops of 6% and 5.5% respectively by 15:45 UTC, reflecting the broader market sentiment (CoinGecko, 2025). The correlation between AI tokens and major cryptocurrencies like ETH and BTC remained strong, with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.75, indicating that AI tokens followed the market's downward trend closely (CryptoQuant, 2025).