Did TenX founder Toby Hoenisch hack the DAO?

The DAO Hack 2016 is still one of the most spectacular hacks in the history of the crypto market. On June 17, 2016, previously unknown hackers began withdrawing funds from the decentralized smart contract into the so-called DarkDAO. In the end, 5 percent of all ETH belonged to the attacker.

As a result of the hack, the ETH community decided to do a hard fork and the stolen coins found their way back into the wallets of the victims. On the other side of the fork, however, was ETH Classic, a coin that is still alive today and for which the hack was not reversed. To date, not all ETC tokens have been cashed out of the hack and there is no trace of the alleged perpetrators – until today.

The trail leads to Toby Hoenisch

Because in this case there is red-hot news. in one article for forbes journalist Laura Shin describes why, in her opinion, TenX co-founder Toby Hoenisch should be responsible for the hack, the spoils of which amount to 11 billion US dollars according to today’s exchange rates. According to this, Hoenisch pointed out a security gap several times in advance, which made it possible to withdraw the same amount over and over again. According to Shin, after none of the responsible programmers took the hints seriously, Hoenisch decided to make use of them himself.

To date, not all stolen coins have been cashed out. However, new analysis tools from Chainalysis provide evidence that Hoenisch is actually behind the attack. So should Hoenisch 50 BTC, which he previously on ShapeShift exchanged for ETC from the hack to a Wasabi wallet to mix the coins there. The outputs in turn ended up on an exchange, where they were exchanged for the privacy coin Grin. In the last step, Shin says, she learned from a reliable source that said Grin tokens ended up on a node called grin.toby.ai. Several Lightning Nodes (ln.toby.ai, lnd.ln.toby.a) and – more importantly – the TenX Lightning Node also run on the same IP address on which the Grin Node runs. The IP address was hosted by Amazon Singapore, TenX’s corporate location.

Julian Hosp: “Toby could have done it”

TenX co-founder and crypto influencer Julian Hosp also thinks it’s possible that Hoenisch is actually behind the DAO hack. The two have been enemies since Hosp was kicked out of the joint project. A personal feud by Hosp cannot be assumed here, however, as the evidence against Hoenisch is too great for that.

“It seems that Toby Hoenisch, a 36-year-old Austrian, is actually the person who hacked the DAO in 2016,” Hosp said in a recent YouTube video.

Toby was a good developer – of course he could have.

Julian Hosp

After Shin confronted Hoenisch with the evidence, the alleged hacker replied that the conclusions were “factually incorrect”. Hoenisch has yet to offer an offer to rectify the matter.

By the way: The TenX token, which was worth 535 million US dollars at its peak, now has a market capitalization of 11 million US dollars – and there is no trace of Toby Hoenisch.