HTX (Huobi) - REKT

It’s shaping up to be a big week.

Two crypto platforms rekt already… and that was just Monday.

Yesterday, Justin Sun announced a $7.9M hack on HTX (formerly Huobi), less than 12 hours after Mixin Network admitted to a $200M loss.

In a thread oozing with His Excellency’s typical arrogance, Sun brushed off the loss as a drop in the ocean compared to the $3B of assets held on the platform, also noting the stolen amount represents “just two weeks' revenue” for the exchange.

In an amusing case of foreshadowing, the hack comes just after Huobi rebranded to HTX. Sounds eerily similar to disgraced SBF’s now bankrupt exchange, doesn’t it?

Sun claimed (somewhat implausibly) not to have noticed the similarity, after CZ wasted no time in poking fun at the irony.

What do they say about people in glass houses again?

First FTX, then 3AC’s GTX, now HTX…

Do we really have to get to ZTX before we hit the bottom?

As often is the case with hacks of centralised exchanges, details of the attack vector are scant.

The 4999 ETH ($7.9M) was drained at 10AM UTC on Sunday, with the remaining 633 ETH (worth $1M) secured by HTX just over two hours later.

Attacker addresses:

0xdb1D74467c9042517A354304256E0d658D8AEC83

0x799982b75Ba538F211871cBa50Fa1A42ADa9ab5E

It seems strange that all funds were not drained, and that, if HTX were immediately aware of the incident (as Sun claims), that the rescue of the leftovers took so long.

Sun also says that the hacker has been identified (why not prove it?) and has extended an offer on-chain of 5% bounty, and a job, valid for seven days after which law enforcement will be informed.

Despite the initial downplaying, Sun followed up with a thread announcing livestreams to talk exchange security. The thread also states:

we have implemented real-time monitoring mechanisms to prevent such losses.

You’d have thought an exchange holding $3B in user assets (as Sun claims) would already have this kind of system in place, right?

But given that Sun tends to use Huobi to YOLO mind-boggling sums of crypto around on a daily basis (presumably part of his duties as some kind of self-proclaimed crypto superhero), such a system might have set off alarm bells a little too often.

There appears to be a sudden wave of bad news coming out of the asian crypto markets recently.

Yesterday Mixin topped the 2023 leaderboard. Before that, another HK exchange, JPEX, abandoned ship following a warning from the regulators, and Upbit fell for a fake token top-up scam.

To top it off, Tether is dismissing rumours of trouble in Singapore as FUD, but someone looks to be trying to get rid of USDT.

Will this $7.9M drop in the ocean turn out to be a simple case of ‘4’ for Huobi?

Or are there bigger things to come?

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