On the evening of November 10th, the hot wallet of the Poloniex exchange was unexpectedly hacked. Shortly afterward, Justin Sun confirmed the incident and committed to maintaining financial stability and refunding affected investors.
Specifically, according to Arkham’s statistics, the damage from the Poloniex exchange hack has exceeded $125 million, including funds withdrawn from other blockchains such as TRON, Bitcoin, and Polygon, in addition to the initial $60 million worth of tokens on Ethereum.
The stolen assets include VGX, PEPE, MATIC, AAVE, TUSD, LINK, and several other tokens. The hacker’s wallet address has been identified as “0x0A5984f86200415894821bFEFc1c1De036DbF9e7.”
“Our wallet has been disabled for maintenance. We will provide updates once the wallet is reactivated,” stated Poloniex.
Currently, Arkham is offering a reward of 10,000 ARKM for anyone who can provide information about the attacker. Furthermore, Justin Sun is negotiating with the hacker and is willing to offer a 5% reward of the stolen amount if the hacker returns the funds within 7 days to avoid legal prosecution.
It’s worth noting that Scopescan also pointed out that the Poloniex hacker was attempting to obscure the stolen USDT and USDC stablecoins by purchasing $22 million worth of TRON’s TRX tokens. This caused the price of TRX to surge by 14%, reaching $1.12. At the time of writing, TRX has experienced some correction and is trading around $1.10.
This is not the first time that an exchange owned and managed by Justin Sun has been hacked, resulting in significant financial losses. In September 2023, Huobi Global (HTX Global) exchange was also attacked, and the hacker withdrew $7.9 million. Fortunately, after two weeks of negotiations, the attacker returned the entire stolen amount.
During the process of moving assets, the hacker is believed to have made a mistake by sending $2.56 million worth of Golem (GLM) tokens back to a smart contract, resulting in the permanent loss of this amount.