- Binance Helped Huobi Global Freeze 124 From Bridge Exploit.
- Huobi’s top advisor highly appreciated Binance’s collaboration.
- Harmony Blockchain offered a $1 million bounty for returns of $100 million or more.
Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, backed rival Chinese firm Huobi Global to recover 124 Bitcoins (BTC) worth $2.58 million from a bridge exploit last year.
We have detected activity in the Harmony One hacker fund. They had previously attempted to launder money through Binance and we have frozen his account. This time I used Fobi. I helped the Huobi team freeze his account. A total of 124 BTC were recovered. CeFi Helps Maintain His DeFi #SAFU!
— CZ Binance (@cz_binance) January 16, 2023
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) tweeted about the recovery, pointing out that the Harmony Bridge hackers had previously tried to launder the proceeds from the exploit through Binance without success. The hacker then decided to use his Huobi exchange and the Binance team helped freeze the hacker’s account.
Huobi Chief Advisor Justin Sun also tweeted, thanking the Binance team for their joint efforts to recover the hacked funds. Sun said:
This is a prime example of how Centralized Exchanges (CeFi) work together to sustain the crypto community #SAFU. We will continue to exercise caution to protect our users’ funds and promote a safe and secure trading environment.
On-chain detective ZachXBT said North Korean Lazarus Group transferred 41,000 (ETH) worth $64 million over the weekend from the Harmony ONE Bridge breach. ZachXBT’s chart shows his transfer of 100 ETH from OFAC-sanctioned Tornado Cash to privacy platform Railgun.
1/2 North Korean Lazarus Group consolidates funds across three different exchanges after a very busy weekend moving $63.5 million (~41,000 ETH) through Railgun from the Harmony bridge hack I made a deposit. pic.twitter.com/huDumaJeSh
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) January 15, 2023
Additionally, ZachXBT pointed out that the hackers later consolidated the funds and placed them on three unnamed exchanges. The move was first spotted by cryptocurrency compliance platform MistTrack on Jan. 14, when Harmony tweeted that addresses related to his bridge exploits were in the move.
After the $100 million Harmony Bridge was hacked on June 24, 2022, the Layer 1 blockchain offered a $1 million bounty for the return of funds.
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