To serve nearly 500 million users across the European Economic Area (EEA), Bybit needed a Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR) license from Austria’s Financial Market Authority (FMA). Acquiring that license required more than paperwork – regulators demand hard, technical proof that every Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) can withstand real-world cyber-attacks.

Solution: Penetration Testing with Hacken

Bybit partnered with Hacken, a blockchain-native security and compliance firm, for a red/blue-team penetration test that produces regulator-grade evidence. Building on eight years of blockchain-security experience, Hacken’s team emulated real attackers, manually exploited critical paths, and delivered governance-ready findings mapped to MiCAR / DORA controls.

Bybit x Hacken Penetration-Testing Highlights

This engagement blended full-scope adversary emulation (red team) with live-fire blue team defense, delivering a crystal-clear view of Bybit’s resilience under realistic attack conditions. Key advantages included:

Adversary emulation and threat intelligence-based scoping
Manual exploitation to simulate impact across systems and user roles
Governance-ready reporting mapped to MiCAR / DORA controls

Bybit’s scope covered multiple layers:

Smart-contract logic – re-entrancy, governance attacks, flash-loan vectors
Node infrastructure – misconfiguration, network-partition, consensus abuse
Wallets – seed-phrase leakage, signature abuse, storage weaknesses
APIs & back-end flows – injection, escalation, insecure integrations
Front-end & session security – phishing, click-jacking, hijack attempts
Incident-response drills – blue-team detect/contain speed under live fire

Bybit proactively adopted this approach to validate the resilience of its infrastructure and strengthen its security posture ahead of license submission.

The outcome: demonstrable evidence that Bybit can absorb, detect, and respond to sophisticated threats – exactly what the FMA expects under MiCAR.

“Securing the MiCAR license in Austria is a testament to our compliance-first approach at Bybit.”
– Ben Zhou, co-founder and CEO of Bybit

Result

License granted: Bybit joins the short list of MiCAR-approved CASPs (alongside Bitpanda).

EU passporting: Bybit’s services are now legally available throughout the EEA.

European HQ: Bybit EU GmbH established in Vienna.
Donau-City-Straße 7 | 1220 Wien, Austria
Commercial Register: 636180i
Listed on fma.gv.at

Regulator trust: The penetration-testing report provided the FMA with defensible proof of Bybit’s operational resilience and consumer-protection controls.

Market confidence: Builds on Hacken’s monthly Proof-of-Reserves checks, reinforcing Bybit’s transparency-first stance.

Bridging Compliance and Security

Europe’s new crypto rules shift “compliance” from documentation to demonstrable resilience. Hacken helps exchanges, custodians, and other CASPs meet that bar with:

Penetration testing for MiCAR / DORA
Incident-response planning and tabletop exercises
Smart-contract and wallet audits
Proof-of-Reserves validation

Hacken Extractor

Hacken Extractor

Mykhailo Kazmirchuk

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