Toby Hoenisch, a former CEO of TenX, has been revealed as the hacker who attacked the Ethereum DAO. A controversial Ethereum hard fork that rolled back the network to help users to recover lost cash was the result of the 2016 hack.
Investigative work by podcaster and journalist Laura Shin, with help from the forensic chain analysis company Chainalysis, led to the discovery. Toby Hoenisch denies the claims.
One of the biggest remaining crypto mysteries is the 2016 hack of Ethereum DAO, which is similar to the Bitfinex exploit from the same year. The mystery now seems to have been resolved.
The investigation puts paid to any false, lingering notion that cryptocurrencies are somehow anonymous.
“But as new applications arise, one of the first uses of crypto—as an anonymity shield—is in retreat, thanks to both regulatory pressure and the fact that transactions on public blockchains are traceable,” confirmed Shin in a Forbes piece.
Shin reveals that Chainalysis has the capability to de-mix and decode Wasabi transactions.
“Using a capability that is being disclosed here for the first time, Chainalysis de-mixed the Wasabi transactions and tracked their output to four exchanges,” she says before adding, “an employee at one of the exchanges confirmed to one of my sources that the funds were swapped for privacy coin Grin and withdrawn to a Grin node called grin.toby.ai.”
As more proof, Shin claims:
“The IP address for that node also hosted Bitcoin Lightning nodes: ln.toby.ai, lnd.ln.toby.ai, etc., and was consistent for over a year; it was not a VPN.”
“It was hosted on Amazon Singapore. Lightning explorer 1ML showed a node at that IP called TenX.”
There is more evidence connecting Hoenisch to the crime, and some of it suggests that the CEO of TenX made it a point to trolling Vitalik Buterin after the crime by posting indirect references to the hack and saying that "too big to fail is failure guaranteed. "
Shin claims that many in the Ethereum community who are familiar with Hoenish have some harsh comments to say. Hoenish was described by Greek software developer Karapetsas, who also worked on the DAO, as a "obnoxious" guy who knew he was better than everyone else .
Perhaps Hoenisch felt he had proved right them all by using the DAO for his own purposes.
Shin reached out to Hoenish who has described the investigation and its report as 'factually inaccurate.'
