Cryptocurrency journalist Laura Shin, as a result of her fine research, Ethereum He claimed to have uncovered the theft.
EXCLUSIVE:
With the publication of my book today, I can finally announce: in the course of writing my book, my sources and I believe we uncovered the identity of the Ethereum’s 2016 DAO hacker.— Laura Shin (@laurashin) February 22, 2022
5% of circulating Ethereum tokens were stolen in The DAO Hack in 2016
As a result of the theft, a total of 3.64 million Ethereum tokens were stolen. This amount stolen from The DAO platform made up 5% of the ETH tokens in circulation at the time.
After the hack event in question, the ETH price suffered a great loss, falling from $ 21 to $ 14. Vitalik Buterin, who wanted to find a solution to the incident, suggested that ETH be divided into two and that the value of the coins in the hands of the hacker should be reduced. With this proposal, Ethereum underwent a hard fork and the coins in the hands of the hacker are no longer available. to Ethereum Classic had turned. ETC, which is predicted to lose its value completely, nevertheless, thanks to its developers, has held on to the market and is trading at about $ 26 today.
The Ethereum Thief Hacker Is Considered To Be Austrian Software Developer Toby Hoenisch
Working with blockchain analysis company Chainalysis, Shin managed to trace the origin of the hack to Austrian software developer Toby Hoenisch. After the hack, Hoenisch continued his activities in the cryptocurrency space and founded the 2017 payment platform TenX. TenX, one of the most invested crypto startups of 2017, later failed and turned into Mimo Capital.
Toby Hoenisch, whom Laura Shin managed to reach, claimed that Shin’s studies and conclusions were completely wrong. Hoenisch, who did not comment further, then began deleting his entire Twitter history. Hoenisch is known to have tweeted about the hack in 2016.
Bitcoins That Hoenisch Sent to the Stock Exchange Have Been Leaving Himself
In his article, Shin also detailed how Chainalysis and how they uncovered the identity of the hacker in question. According to the journalist’s claim, Hoenisch had 50 shares on the cryptocurrency platform Wasabi Wallet. bitcoin had sent. Wasabi Wallet uses technology that “scrambles” cryptocurrencies, preventing transactions from being tracked.
Shin said that thanks to a new method that has not been disclosed until now, Chainalysis resolved these scrambled Blockchain transactions and detected that the Bitcoins in question were sent to four different exchanges.
According to some users, Chainalysis’ method of resolving Wasabi transactions could have significant implications for the entire industry in the future.
Bitcoins Converted To A Cryptocurrency Called Grin
After that, Shin contacted the officials of the said exchange and managed to get information from the employees of one of these exchanges. The Bitcoins in question grin (GRIN) and then sent to a Grin Blockchain node called grin.toby.ai.
Shin said the following on the subject:
“We found that the IP address of this Grin Blockchain node also operates Bitcoin Lightning nodes. These nodes were called ln.toby.ai, lnd.ln.toby.ai. The IP address has remained stable for over a year. The hacker did not use a VPN here.
When we followed the hosting of the node in question, we saw that it was connected to Amazon Singapore. When we tracked it on the Lightning network search platform 1ML, we realized that this IP address belongs to a Node named TenX.”
Shin also said that on the exchange where the Grin coin was withdrawn, the hacker’s username ends with “@toby.ai”.
However, when Hoenisch’s tweets in 2016 are examined, we see that he is extremely related to the hacked platform, The DAO.
Hoenisch also shared a lot of pro-Ethereum Classic posts on Twitter after the hard fork of Ethereum, after the hacked assets were converted to ETC.
On the subject, Julian Hosp, one of the TenX co-founders and currently running the Cake DeFi platform, explained that Hoenisch told him that he needed to short ETH right after The DAO went live.