HTX Loses $7.9 Million To Hacker, Asks For Money Back

HTX, the Seychelles-based crypto exchange formerly known as Huobi, has lost $7.9 million worth of ETH to a hacker less than one month after the company’s rebranding.

“HTX has suffered a loss of 5,000 ETH due to a hacker attack,” confirmed Tron founder and HTX advisor Justin Sun on Twitter on Monday. “HTX has fully covered the losses incurred from the attack and has successfully resolved all related issues.”

HTX did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

Blockchain investigators like PeckShield caught wind of the hack ahead of time, identifying a suspicious outbound 4,999 ETH transaction from the exchange on Sunday at roughly 10:00 a.m. UST. The hacker’s addresses have been identified here and here.

Sun noted that the losses represent a “relatively small sum” of the $3 billion in assets currently held by users. “It amounts to just two weeks’ revenue for the HTX platform,” he said.

According to DefiLlama, HTX currently has $2.7 billion worth assets on hand—a figure that’s remained relatively stable since November of last year. Roughly one-third (29.4%) of that value is stored in Tron’s native TRX token, with its second largest holding being Bitcoin 27.49%.

Though the share of lost funds is small, the exchange is vying to get its money back. In a message sent over the blockchain, HTX said that the hacker’s “true identity” had already been unmasked, and threatened to “involve law enforcement” if funds were not returned within one week.

“We are willing to offer 5% of the stolen amount ($400,000) as a white-hat reward to encourage the hacker to return the stolen funds,” Sun added over Twitter. “If the hacker returns the funds, we will also hire them as a security white-hat advisor for HTX.”

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said Binance’s security team would assist in tracking the hacker’s funds where possible.

Earlier this month, crypto exchange CoinEX also proposed a bug bounty after losing an estimated $54 million in assets to hackers connected with North Korea’s Lazarus Group.