The CEO and co-founder of KuCoin, Johnny Lyu, announced that he was able to discover the criminal behind the hack that took place on September 26th against the exchange.
A quick update since my last livestream on Sep 30.
After a thorough investigation, we have found the suspects of the 9.26 #KuCoin Security Incident with substantial proof at hand. Law enforcement officials and police are officially involved to take action.
— Johnny_KuCoin (@lyu_johnny) October 3, 2020
Fortunately, in the meantime it is already possible for some users to make deposits and withdrawals from the platform again.
These criminals, according to the CEO, have already been identified, although no further information is available at the moment.
The Kucoin’s hack
The criminals had managed to steal almost $300 million in several cryptocurrencies and many ERC20 tokens, but thanks to the intervention of some protocols and platforms in the industry, as well as other centralized exchanges, some of the funds were recovered.
Another part of the funds has been liquidated through decentralized exchanges (DEX), such as Uniswap.
In particular, from the data provided by Elliptic we can see that the funds have been liquidated in this way:
- 10 million dollars have flowed into Uniswap;
- 4 million dollars in Kyber Network;
- 2 million dollars on 1inch;
- 1.6 million dollars on dex.ag;
- Half a million dollars on Tokenlon;
- Only $1.3 million on other centralized exchanges (CEX).
As we have said, the theft involved several ERC20 tokens and in some cases also decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, which partly collaborated to limit the damages of the huge theft.
For example, several projects, such as Orion (ORN) and Opacity (OPQ) decided to swap old tokens into new ones, making the previous ones practically unusable.
Other companies have followed the path of token freezing, such as Covesting (COV), VIDT_Datalink (VIDT) and Ampleforth (AMPL).
From these data we can also learn that true decentralization is still only a mirage, since teams can behave like real centralized platforms, blocking and disabling functions.
Interesting finally the comment by Jameson Lopp, who makes a comparison with what happened with The DAO and the creation of the fork of Ethereum Classic.
History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme. Fascinating to see how rollbacks have evolved since The DAO. https://t.co/oKyv4C4UAg
— Jameson Lopp (@lopp) September 27, 2020
