Journalist Laura Shin claimed the involvement of former co-founder and chief financial officer of blockchain startup TenX, Tobi Henisha, in the The DAO hack. She wrote about this in a Forbes article Forbes, published in addition to the investigative book released on February 22.
Chainalysis aided in identifying the hacker. According to analysts, he sent 50 BTC to a Wasabi Wallet with mixing capability. Similarly, in 2020 the attacker, who hacked the KuCoin cryptocurrency exchange, did the same.
According to Chainalysis, the hacker sent the funds to four trading platforms. An employee of one of them told Shin that the assets were exchanged for privacy-focused cryptocurrency Grin.
According to Shin, Henisha was traced thanks to the identified IP address and the credentials used to set up Lightning— and Grin nodes (ln.toby.ai and lnd.ln.toby.ai).
Shin says Henish used the handle tobyai on many social networks, including Twitter. One of his email addresses reportedly ended with “toby.ai”. The journalist stressed that the former TenX co-founder “was familiar with the DAO code and its flaws, having discussed such matters with the creator of Slock.it.”
Henish denied the allegations and told Forbes that their “assertion and conclusion are essentially inaccurate.”
The Singapore blockchain startup TenX was involved in issuing bank crypto cards. In 2017 the project conducted an ICO, raising about $83 million.
In January 2019, co-founder and president Julian Hosp left his post amid a scandal surrounding his ties to the Lyoness pyramid scheme. Tobi Henish became the sole head of TenX.
In October 2020, project announced a change in its business model, abandoning the servicing of crypto cards due to the Wirecard collapse. At the same time Hosp stated that Henish left Singapore. The startup denied internal problems.
In March 2016, the German blockchain startup Slock.it announced the launch of its own DAO as a new model for corporate financing and governance. The project named The DAO raised about $165 million through a crowd sale, but as a result of a critical vulnerability in the smart contract, a significant portion of the funds (3.6 million ETH) was stolen.
Subsequently, Ethereum developers took the controversial decision to perform a network hard fork, after which the project Ethereum Classic emerged.
In the same year, investors accused the Ethereum Foundation developers group known as the Robin Hood Team of hacking The DAO. They had previously announced plans to return the project’s funds without resorting to a hard fork.
In 2019, the Nevada-based incubation and investment firm Blockchains bought Slock.it.
According to Chainalysis, in 2021 cybercriminals laundered $8.6 billion of cryptocurrency— 30% more than in the previous period.
Subscribe to ForkLog News on Telegram: ForkLog Feed — full news feed, ForkLog — the most important news, infographics and opinions.