Forbes journalist accuses former TenX CEO of hacking The DAO

Forbes journalist Laura Shin investigated The DAO hack in 2016. According to her, the Austrian programmer Toby Hoenisch was behind the theft of $60 million.

According to the article, Laura Shin brought in experts from Chainalysis, an analytics firm. They analyzed transactions related to The DAO hack and linked them to wallets owned by former TenX CEO Toby Hoenisch.

According to Chainalysis, the hacker who hacked The DAO sent 50 BTC to his Wasabi Wallet and performed a mixing operation to hide the source of the funds. He then transferred the bitcoins to four cryptocurrency exchanges. An employee of one of these sites said that the funds received from the wallet were exchanged for the anonymous Grin cryptocurrency and withdrawn to a Grin node called grin.toby.ai.

This IP address, which also hosts Lightning Network nodes, belongs to the TenX project. Toby Hoenisch himself used the pseudonym @tobyai on many social platforms, including Twitter, as well as in his email address.

The journalist emphasizes that Hoenisch was familiar with The DAO code and the vulnerabilities of the project – he even talked with the creator of the project about these problems. Therefore, concludes Laura Shin, it is highly likely that Toby Hoenisch hacked the project. Hoenisch himself denies all allegations. He called the conclusions of the Forbes journalist “not consistent with reality and not confirmed by the facts.”

Recall that The DAO was one of the first projects based on smart contracts in the Ethereum network. In 2016, the hacker managed to withdraw 3.64 million ETH, which at the time of the hack was $60 million. After that, the first hard fork was held in Ethereum to fix errors in smart contracts, and the network of the second cryptocurrency was divided into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.

In the same year, the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange was hacked. This was one of the largest hacks in history – the hackers managed to withdraw almost 120,000 BTC. Recently, American police arrested a New York couple for laundering these bitcoins – they had 94,000 BTC worth $3.6 billion confiscated from them.

Source: Bits

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