Bybit, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume, has launched the third season of its Hot Tokens Trading Arena with a prize pool of 261,000 USDT, more than double last season’s 150,000 USDT. The competition runs from May 14 to June 3, 2026, inviting traders to vie for leaderboard rankings and bonus task rewards using designated trading pairs.
Traders can trade nine USDT-quoted spot and futures pairs: BTC/USDT, ETH/USDT, SOL/USDT, XRP/USDT, DOGE/USDT, HYPE/USDT, XAUT/USDT, SUI/USDT, and MNT/USDT. The top-ranked trader by volume will receive up to 15,000 USDT, with total rewards distributed among top performers. The previous season attracted over 47,000 participants who traded over $4.8 billion in trending tokens. The new season triples the number of eligible tokens for the leaderboard.
In a separate initiative, Bybit also concluded an anti-money laundering (AML) research collaboration with student teams from the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Students used the February 2025 Bybit security breach as a case study to apply machine learning and blockchain analytics in tracing funds linked to the Lazarus Group. They analyzed approximately 49,800 Bitcoin blocks and over 146 million transactions, identifying 10,289 Wasabi-like transactions and constructing a subgraph of 1.6 million address nodes. One machine learning cluster achieved a 70.5% recall rate against confirmed DPRK-linked addresses. The project aimed to improve probabilistic analysis of mixer transactions, as deterministic attribution is mathematically infeasible.
