Crypto journalist Laura Shin says that extended research and investigation around the infamous hack on The DAO in 2016 was able to unearth the identity of the hacker as one Toby Hoenisch, an apparent well-known figure within the crypto space.
Shin shared the details in a Forbes article, saying she came to the conclusion as part of her investigations for her book “The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze.”
The journalist said Hoenisch dubbed her conclusion “factually inaccurate” and offered to provide details to refute such claims — but didn’t actually do so despite repeated follow-ups.
Benzinga has reached out to Hoenisch but has not received a response as of the time of publication.
Hoenisch is best known for co-founding TenX, which has since rebranded to Mimo Capital. TenX raised $80 million through an initial coin offering in 2017 to develop a cryptocurrency debit card, but the project didn’t succeed in realizing its mission.
Speculating on Hoenisch’s motive behind the alleged theft, Shin said it could be because his repeated warnings related to security weren’t being taken seriously enough by the creators of the DAO, which was at the center of the hack.
From one of the exchanges, the alleged hacker swapped the BTC for the privacy coin Grin. These tokens were then sent to a Grin node that analysis showed as grin.toby.ai. The IP address of this particular node was also connected to other nodes such as ln.toby.ai and lnd.ln.toby.ai, with another linked to TenX.
“For anyone who was into crypto in June 2017, this name may ring a bell. That month, as the ICO craze was reaching its initial peak, there was an $80 million ICO named TenX. The CEO and cofounder used the handle @tobyai on AngelList, Betalist, GitHub, Keybase, LinkedIn, Medium, Pinterest, Reddit, StackOverflow, and Twitter. His name was Toby Hoenisch.”
Apart from these “links”, Shin says Hoenisch had been an active individual around The DAO, severally emailing the platform’s developers Slock.it.
Apart from these “links”, Shin says Hoenisch had been an active individual around The DAO, severally emailing the platform’s developers Slock.it.
The story has just broken after Shin’s book was published and it is now likely a lot more could be revealed, including from those Hoenisch emailed.
The DAO remains one of the largest thefts in the crypto space, even though the hacker never managed to cash out all the stolen funds. At the time in 2016, The DAO’s stolen funds amounted to about $60 million.
Today, that would be nearly $10 billion following Ether (ETH) prices rallying from lows of $20 then.
