Journalist Laura Shin announced the involvement of ex-co-founder and CFO of the blockchain startup TenX Toby Henish in hacking The DAO. She wrote about this in a Forbes article published in addition to the investigative book released on February 22.
The company Chainalysis helped in identifying the hacker of Tires. According to analysts, he sent 50 BTC to the Wasabi wallet with the possibility of mixing. An attacker who hacked the KuCoin cryptocurrency exchange did the same in 2020.
According to Chainalysis, the hacker sent funds to four trading platforms. An employee of one of them informed Shin that the assets were exchanged for the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency Grin.
According to the journalist, it was possible to reach Henish thanks to an identified IP address and credentials when setting up Lightning and Grin nodes (ln.toby.ai and lnd.ln.toby.ai ).
What is Grin?
According to Shin, Henish used the nickname tobyai on many social networks, including Twitter. One of his email addresses allegedly ended in “toby.ai The journalist stressed that the ex-co-founder of TenX “was familiar with the DAO code and its shortcomings, since he communicated with the creator Slock.it on such issues.”
Henisch denied the accusations against him and told Forbes that their “statement and conclusion are factually inaccurate.”
Singapore-based blockchain startup TenX was engaged in issuing bank cryptocurrency cards. In 2017, the project held an ICO, which raised about $83 million.
In January 2019, the co-founder and president of the startup Julian Hosp left the post amid a scandal surrounding his connection with the Lyoness pyramid scheme. Toby Henish became the sole head of TenX.
In October 2020, the project announced a change in the business model, abandoning the maintenance of crypto cards due to the collapse of Wirecard. At the same time, the Hospice announced that Henish had left Singapore. The startup denied the existence of internal problems.
In March 2016, a German blockchain startup Slock.it announced the launch of its own DAO as a new model of corporate finance and management. The project called The DAO raised about $165 million through crowdsale, but as a result of a critical vulnerability in the smart contract, a significant part of the funds (3.6 million ETH) was stolen.
Subsequently, the Ethereum developers made a controversial decision to conduct a hard fork of the network, after which the Ethereum Classic project appeared.
In the same year, investors accused a group of Ethereum Foundation developers called Robin Hood Team of hacking The DAO. Earlier, they announced plans to return the project funds without resorting to a hard fork.
In 2019, Nevada-based incubation and investment firm Blockchains bought Slock.it .
Recall that Chainalysis estimated that in 2021 cybercriminals laundered cryptocurrencies worth $8.6 billion — 30% more than in the previous period.