Scandalous mixer Blender relaunched under a new name

The sub-sanctioned bitcoin mixer Blender, which helped North Korean hackers launder stolen cryptocurrencies, has started working again, but under the name Sinbad. About it report researchers at blockchain analytics firm Elliptic.

As experts found out, Sinbad was launched in October 2022. Despite its recent launch, the mixer has already laundered “tens of millions of dollars” in crypto associated with the Harmony Horizon Bridge cross-chain hack. Moreover, attackers continue to use the mixer to this day, demonstrating confidence in the new protocol, Ellitic emphasizes.

Elliptic believes that the same people who worked on Blender are responsible for Sinbad. At least this is indicated by on-chain activity: even before the public launch, addresses associated with Sinbad received about $22 million in cryptocurrency from a wallet owned by the Blender operator.

It also turned out that Sinbad pays the same bitcoins that were stored on the Blender wallet for advertising the mixer. According to analysts, Russian-speaking attackers are also behind the new project (as in the case of Blender), since the site has support in Russian. According to Elliptic, the US authorities may soon impose sanctions on Sinbad, which means that wallets that have been in contact with the mixer will also be blacklisted for crypto exchanges.

• Recall that the US Department of the Treasury in May 2022 imposed sanctions against Blender.io. The mixer manually laundered over $20 million in cryptocurrencies for North Korean hackers, according to the ministry. The US Treasury believes that in addition to funds from the Horizon Bridge, the cryptocurrency associated with the Axie Infinity hack was also laundered through Blender.
• In total, since its inception in 2017, Blender has helped launder $500 million worth of bitcoin. The US Treasury also claims that Russian extortion groups Trickbot, Conti, Ryuk, Sodinokibi, and Gandcrab have also laundered cryptocurrency through Blender.io.