New research by journalist Laura Shin and blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis suggests that former TenX CEO Toby Hoenisch was behind the attack that resulted in the theft of $60 million in ETH from The DAO in 2016.
Shin pointed to a series of actions to support his claims. Chainalysis claims it managed to track the funds and sent them to four exchanges. Accordingly, The DAO attacker sent 50 BTC to a Wasabi wallet and used a mixer to try to hide his transaction history. An employee at one of the exchanges tells Shin that the funds were exchanged for the privacy coin Grin and sent to a Grin node called grin.toby.ai. The IP address of this node also hosted Bitcoin Lightning nodes ln.toby.ai and lnd.ln.toby.ai. Also, a node at this IP address was named TenX. Shin also claimed that Hoenisch was familiar with the DAO’s code and had weaknesses with the code, communicating with its creator, slock.it, about such issues.
Hoenisch, on the other hand, denied the allegations and told Forbes, where the article on the claim was published, that “the statements and the conclusion were wrong”.
What is The DAO?
The DAO was one of Ethereum’s first on-chain funding attempts and was hacked on June 17, 2016. A team of white hat hackers took action and managed to freeze the funds for a short time. Meanwhile, the Ethereum blockchain was forked into Ethereum Classic (the original chain) and the network we now know as Ethereum to fix the problem.
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