Another Suspect in Ethereum's DAO Hack Emerges, Putting Coin Mixing Under Question
A prominent crypto journalist has published a remarkable j’accuse article claiming to unmask the identity of the 2016 hack on The DAO, which saw a raider make off with ETH 3.6m, now worth over USD 9.4bn. However, what is possibly more important, it put the popular coin mixing technology under question.
Writing for Forbes, Laura Shin explained that her research, in conjunction with that of the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, had traced the hack to the Austrian programmer Toby Hoenisch, the co-founder of the now-defunct TenX payments platform, one of the top 10 ICOs of 2017, that was turned into Mimo Capital.
Cryptonews.com has contacted Hoenisch with a request for comment.
"After being sent a document detailing the evidence pointing to him as the hacker, Hoenisch wrote in an email, “Your statement and conclusion is factually inaccurate.” In that email, Hoenisch offered to provide details refuting our findings—but never answered my repeated follow-up messages to him asking for those details," Shin wrote.
In her article, Shin explained how Chainalysis data had traced a “presumed attacker” who had “sent bitcoin (BTC) 50 to a Wasabi Wallet address. The wallet makes use of “mixing” technology that aims to anonymize transactions by mixing numerous blockchain movements together at once in a CoinJoin.
She claimed that “using a capability” that was “being disclosed here for the first time,” Chainalysis had “de-mixed the Wasabi transactions and tracked their output to four exchanges.”
For some notable observers, the fact that Chainalysis appears to have developed the ability to de-mix Wasabi transactions was a major revelation with potentially significant consequences for the entire sector.
Shin continued, explaining that “an
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