The DAO hacker finally unmasked thanks to an investigation?

Any name on The DAO hacker?

It may well be that the light is finally shed on the origin of the hack of ” The DAO ”, which could well have brought the second largest blockchain in the entire ecosystem to its knees, Ethereum (ETH).

This is journalist and author Laura Shinspecializing in the world of blockchain, which conducted a long-term investigation alongside the company data analysis Chainalysis in order to find the traces of the one who would be responsible for this dark page in the history of Ethereum.

EXCLUSIVE:
With the publication of my book today, I can finally announce: in the course of writing my book, my sources and I believe we uncovered the identity of the Ethereum’s 2016 DAO hacker.

—Laura Shin (@laurashin) February 22, 2022

According to this survey, it seems that the culprit is Toby Hoenischa 36-year-old man who grew up in Australia and lived in Singapore at the time of the hack.

The man is however not unknown to the general public. Effectively, it is one of the co-founders of TenXa project which had succeeded in raising 80 million dollars in order to develop a credit card service dedicated to cryptocurrencies. It never got beyond the project stage as it eventually ended up being scrapped.

To find out more, the journalist contacted Toby Hoenisch in order to inform him of his investigations, to which he would have simply replied ” Your statement and conclusion are factually incorrect. “.

? Find our file on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain

Back to the event

Back to 2016: a smart contract called “The DAO” attracted all eyes back then, when the blockchain world was (very) far from being as vast and varied as it is today. Concretely, “The DAO” was a fundraiser open to the general public and hosted on the Ethereum blockchainduring which the participants saw each other hand over governance tokens to decide on the future of the projects listed there.

Slock.it, the company behind this ideaexpected The DAO to raise around $5 million, far from imagining the success that awaited it.

Everything happened quickly: the public sale started on April 30 and raised $9 million in just 48 hours. Within a month, The DAO had 15% of all Ether available on the market. On June 17, Ether prints a price of $21.52thus carrying The DAO is worth $249.6 million.

But joy quickly gave way to dismay. The team behind The DAO is beginning to realize that Ether is slowly being drained on the same day. Within hours, 31% of Ether had already been stolenand the price of the cryptocurrency had fallen by 33%.

A decision had to be made quickly to avoid catastrophe, and this is where Ethereum experienced its now famous first hard fork under the name “DAO Fork”, thus becoming the blockchain we know today.

A few months later, the attacker transformed his ETC (name of ETH on Ethereum Classic following the hard fork) into Bitcoins (BTC) on the ShapeShift exchangeand the story ended there.

Further clarifications

6 years later, we learn thanks to this investigation that Chainalysis would have developed a tool to trace cryptocurrencies that have passed through mixing solutions.

Today, many hackers use this tool through different platforms such as Tornado Cash, which was used in the Meter bridge hack earlier this month. These protocols make it possible to “mix” the different funds deposited therein in order to make them untraceable, which therefore allows hackers to maintain a certain anonymity.

Thanks to this tool developed by Chainalysis, the journalist was able to realize that the attacker had then used Wasabi Walleta wallet using this method, to store its BTC on 4 different addresses.

Then, the hacker would have used the different wallets to transform its BTC into GRIN tokens via a Grin node with the address “grin.toby.ai”.

Little by little, it would have been possible for Laura Shin to go back to the addresses of the nodes then used, which always ended in “.ai”. Worse still: one of the addresses was directly associated with the TenX company.

But that’s not all. According to Laura Shin, Toby Hoenisch used the handle “@tobyai” on many social networks including Twitter and Reddit, and even his email address had the same ending. He would also have used this same address to communicate with an employee of Slock.it to inform him of the flaws he had found in The DAO’s system some time before the attack.

So it remains to be seen whether a new investigation will be carried out by the authorities following the appearance of these rather disturbing new elements and now that the person responsible seems to have been clearly identified.

? To go further: Ether (ETH) dominance in danger, according to Morgan Stanley