The man responsible for hacking the "Ethereum DAO" in 2016 has been named as former TenX CEO Toby Hoenisch. The hack resulted in a controversial Ethereum hard fork that rolled back the network so stolen funds could be returned to users.
The revelation comes thanks to investigative work by podcaster and journalist Laura Shin, with assistance from the forensic crypto analysis firm Chainalysis. Toby Hoenisch denies the claims. Much like the Bitfinex exploit of the same year, the 2016 hack of Ethereum DAO is one of the great long-standing mysteries in crypto. The loss of 3.64 million ETH would today be valued at $11 billion. Now it appears as though the mystery has been solved.
Are public blockchains really anonymous?
The investigation puts paid to any false, lingering notion that cryptocurrencies are somehow anonymous and useful for illegal activities. Laura Shin herself claimed that as 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. In particular, Shin reveals that Chainalysis has the capability to de-mix and decode so-called "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. 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employee at one of the exchanges confirmed to one of my sources that the funds were swapped for privacy coin Grin and withdrawn to a Grin node called grin.toby.ai.” - Laura Shin, podcaster and journalist
As further evidence Shin stated 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; according to her it was not a VPN. Instead it was hosted on Amazon Singapore. The Lightning explorer 1ML showed a node at that IP called TenX - a previous project founded by Toby Hoenisch.
Toby Hoenisch denies the claims
Further evidence exists to link Hoenisch to the crime, and some of it suggests that the TenX CEO went out of his way to troll Vitalik Buterin after the crime – posting oblique references to the hack stating that "too big to fail is failure guaranteed".
According to Shin, those from the Ethereum community who know Hoenish had some unkind words to share. Greek software developer Karapetsas who also worked on the DAO described Hoenish as an obnoxious individual who knew better than everyone else. By exploiting the DAO, perhaps Hoenisch felt he had proved them all right. Shin reached out to Hoenish who has described the investigation and its report as factually inaccurate.
