Bybit Review 2026: Fees, the $1.5B Hack & US Availability

In February 2025, Bybit became the answer to a trivia question nobody wanted to be the answer to: the largest cryptocurrency exchange hack in history. Roughly $1.5 billion in Ethereum vanished in a single exploit tied to a compromised multisig wallet, attributed by the FBI to North Korean state-linked hackers. For a lot of people searching "bybir" or "bybyt" or any of the dozen ways this name gets typo’d, that’s the headline that comes to mind first — and it should, honestly. But it’s also only half the story, and the second half is arguably more informative than the hack itself.

What Actually Happened in February 2025

The exploit targeted a Safe{Wallet} multisig cold wallet used by Bybit, not a flaw in Bybit’s own exchange code directly — attackers manipulated the signing interface during a routine transfer, tricking authorized signers into approving a transaction that redirected roughly 401,000 ETH to an attacker-controlled address. It’s the kind of attack that exploits trust in third-party infrastructure rather than brute-forcing an exchange’s own servers, and it’s part of why the broader industry took the incident so seriously — the same wallet infrastructure gets used well beyond Bybit alone.

What happened next is the part worth paying attention to. Bybit didn’t pause withdrawals, didn’t go quiet, and didn’t leave users guessing. The exchange publicly confirmed the breach within hours, kept processing customer withdrawals throughout — an operational choice that’s genuinely rare during a crisis of this scale — and fully replenished the stolen funds within 72 hours through a combination of bridge loans and its own balance sheet. No customer lost a cent of the roughly $1.5 billion taken. That response is now widely cited as a case study in crisis management for an industry that has, historically, handled similar moments far worse.

Is Bybit Safe to Use Now?

A year-plus removed from the incident, Bybit has leaned hard into rebuilding trust through transparency: monthly proof-of-reserves audits conducted by Hacken, with more than 30 consecutive reports published as of early 2026, each confirming reserves meet or exceed customer holdings. The exchange also secured a MiCAR license in the EU in May 2025, operating formally as Bybit EU out of Vienna — a meaningful regulatory step that lets it legally serve customers in Germany, Austria, and other EU markets under a recognized framework rather than operating purely offshore.

None of that erases the hack from the record, and it shouldn’t. But an exchange that got tested at the worst possible scale and absorbed the full loss without passing it to customers is a different risk profile than one that’s simply never been tested yet.

Is Bybit Available in the US?

No. Bybit does not serve US residents under its own terms of service, and the United States is explicitly listed as an excluded jurisdiction. The exchange does not hold US regulatory licenses, actively blocks US-based IP addresses, and attempting to access it from the US via a VPN violates the platform’s terms — something that can create real problems during KYC checks or at withdrawal time rather than a workaround worth relying on. US residents looking for comparable derivatives depth typically end up at Kraken or a Binance.US-style regulated alternative instead, both with narrower product sets but full US legal standing.

Bybit is also restricted or unavailable across roughly 16 jurisdictions globally, including the UK and Canada, so checking current availability for your specific country before signing up is worth the two minutes it takes.

What Trading on Bybit Actually Costs

Bybit’s pricing is one of its most consistent strengths across independent reviews, particularly on the derivatives side where the exchange has built its core reputation.

Market	Maker fee	Taker fee
Spot trading	0.10%	0.10%
Perpetual futures	0.02%	0.055%
With BIT token discount	Up to 25–30% further reduction	Up to 25–30% further reduction
VIP 3 tier (30-day volume $50,000+)	~0.0625%	~0.075%

Those futures rates sit among the lowest of any major exchange, broadly comparable to OKX and noticeably cheaper than Coinbase Advanced’s standard tiers. Deposits carry no platform fee, and withdrawals are charged only at the blockchain’s standard network rate.

Beyond the Hack: What Bybit Actually Offers

Strip away the 2025 headline and Bybit’s underlying product is a derivatives-first exchange with real depth: over 350 tradable assets, one of the largest copy-trading ecosystems in the industry with tens of thousands of signal providers, staking and Earn products, and a trading interface that consistently gets praised for being cleaner than competitors like Binance or OKX. It ranks as roughly the second-largest centralized exchange globally by spot trading volume, trailing only Binance.

Common Questions About Bybit

Is Bybit publicly traded?

Can I buy Bybit stock? No. Bybit Group remains privately held, with no public ticker or stock price available on any exchange.

Does Bybit have its own token?

Bybit offers a token called BIT that provides trading fee discounts when used to pay fees — similar in concept to BNB on Binance, though less central to the platform’s identity. Unlike some competitors, Bybit’s main VIP discount tiers are volume-based rather than token-based.

Is Bybit available in the US?

No. The US is a listed excluded jurisdiction under Bybit’s terms of service, and the platform does not hold US regulatory licenses.

What happened in the 2025 Bybit hack?

Attackers compromised the signing process on a third-party multisig cold wallet (Safe{Wallet}) and redirected roughly $1.5 billion in Ethereum. Bybit fully replenished the stolen funds within 72 hours, and no customer funds were ultimately lost.

Is "sàn Bybit" a different platform?

No — "sàn" is simply Vietnamese for "exchange," so "sàn Bybit" just means "the Bybit exchange." Same platform, same policies, regardless of the language used to search for it.

Why are Bybit’s futures fees so much lower than its spot fees?

This is standard across most derivatives-focused exchanges — futures markets typically carry deeper liquidity and higher trading volume, which lets platforms price them more competitively than spot markets, where margins tend to be thinner per trade.

Weighing the Hack Against Everything Since

Judging Bybit fairly in 2026 means holding two facts at once without letting either one cancel the other out: it suffered the largest exchange hack in crypto history, and it handled that hack about as responsibly as an exchange can — full transparency, uninterrupted withdrawals, complete restitution, and a year of consistent, audited proof-of-reserves since. Neither fact erases the other. For traders weighing where to place real money, that combination of a severe stress test and a clean recovery is arguably more informative than years of quiet operation at a platform that’s simply never faced its own version of that moment yet. As Wes Ibarra puts it when weighing claims about infrastructure resilience against what actually happened under pressure, "My job is to ask for the methodology anyway — and to give credit on the rare occasions the math actually holds up." Bybit’s post-hack numbers, so far, hold up to that kind of scrutiny.