The culprit of "The DAO" hack, which stole 3.6M ETH in 2016, has been traced to TenX CEO Toby Hoenisch. Hoenisch denies the allegations; however, a complicated trail of crypto transactions points right to him.
The DAO hack
- The DAO hack infamously prompted Ethereum to do a hard fork, splitting into Ethereum as we know it and Ethereum Classic.
- The hard fork allowed holders of The DAO token to exchange it for ETH.
- The hack siphoned off 31% of The DAO's ETH into a new DAO, referred to as the DarkDAO.
- The fork transformed the DarkDAO's ETH holdings into Ethereum Classic.
- The Ethereum Classic that DarkDAO holds is still worth over $100M.
- The hacker also managed to trade some ETC for 282 Bitcoin through an exchange known as ShapeShift, which didn't have KYC at that time.
For the last few years, it seemed that the unknown hacker would just forever be sitting on millions of ETH Classic and Bitcoin that he couldn't cash out.
Until ...
Remember the 282 Bitcoin? Well, the hacker tried to cash those out by sending 50 BTC to Wasabi Wallet, a private desktop Bitcoin Wallet that anonymizes transactions by mixing several together through something called a CoinJoin.
Until recently, this worked, but a new technology developed by Chainalysis allowed the company to de-mix the transactions and track them to four exchanges.
An employee at one of the exchanges confirmed that the funds were swapped for a privacy coin known as Grin — normally, employees can't disclose customer information like this due to exchange privacy policies.
- The Grin Token was ultimately transferred to a Grin node called grin.toby.ai.
The IP address for that node also happened to host Bitcoin Lightning Network nodes: ln.toby.ai, lnd.ln.toby.ai, etc., meaning it was not routed through a VPN but instead was hosted on Amazon Singapore. The Lightning explorer 1ML showed a node that traced to the IP address called TenX.
- Toby Hoenish is the co-founder and CEO of TenX.
- He lives in Singapore.
- He uses the @tobyai on AngelList, Betalist, GitHub, Keybase, LinkedIn, Medium, Pinterest, Reddit, StackOverflow, and Twitter.