HTX, Heco Chain fall victim to a $100m hack

Suspicious transfers at crypto exchange HTX and blockchain protocol Heco Chain were confirmed to be a hack by Justin Sun in a post on X (formerly Twitter|) on Wednesday. The founder of Tron DAO is one of the investors at the exchange.

Cumulative losses of the hack has been estimated to be around $97million in various tokens. Deposits and withdrawals are now temporarily suspended. Assuring that all of the funds in HTX were secure, Sun stated that HTX would fully compensate for any losses originating from the exchange’s hot wallets.

Talking about the next steps, he said: “We are investigating the specific reasons for the hacker attack. Once we complete the investigation and identify the cause, we will resume services.”

The transfers made in the hack were first flagged by blockchain security firm Cyver earlier in the day. Tagging Sun in the post, Cyver claimed to have detected multiple suspicious transactions from the Heco Chain bridge via its AI-powered systems. A suspicious address then received around $85m where the first transaction amounted to 10,145 $ETH.

The attack is suspected to have happened due to a private key leak, which allowed holders to access the Heco bridge, which lets users transfer tokens between Heco Chain and Ethereum.

Formed out of a merger between Tron and BitTorrent, Heco Chain was set up by HTX, which then continued to be one of its maintainers. However, both HTX and Heco Chain now operate independently.

On-chain analytics platform, Arkham Intelligence, has now announced creating and funding a bounty to help identify the person or organisation behind the attack. Sun has reposted this message on his X account.

Just two months back, HTX was victimised in another hack where malicious actors made off with 5,000 $ETH before the breach was detected. Comparatively, it was a much smaller attack with the losses amounting to about $7.9m.

However, they were fully covered in the days following the incident as Sun assured users of their assets saying that $8m represented “a relatively small sum in comparison to the $3bn worth of assets held by our users”. This figure amounted to just two weeks’ of the HTX platform’s revenue.

The attack had followed a rebranding of the exchange where it changed its name from Huobi to HTX on the occasion of its 10th anniversary. In doing so, it revealed its new mission to build a metaverse free port with a vision to achieve financial freedom for eight billion people on earth.

Explaining its new name, the official announcement said: “’H’ stands for Huobi, ‘T’ represents TRON with a commitment to being all in TRON, and ‘X’ stands for the exchange. Looking at HTX through the combination of HT and X, HT represents the native token of the platform while X symbolises the exchange. Hence, HTX is an exchange with its native token of HT.”

“X”, on the other hand, also denotes the Roman numeral for 10, which pays tributes to HTX’s 10th anniversary. The platform heralded the move as “a new era” with synergy between HTX, TRON, and Poloniex. A brand new slogan was also revealed on the occasion which now goes like: “HTX, Just Trade It”.