In brief
- About $203 million was lost to the KuCoin hacker, according to information disclosed by KuCoin.
- Crypto projects have frozen (or intend to freeze) 65% of that, according to data disclosed by KuCoin.
- The true damage may be much greater.
Update: A previous version of this article said that some coins, among them penis.finance and Dino Token, were stolen. In several cases, the developers of such tokens sent them to the hacker's wallet.
KuCoin, the cryptocurrency exchange hacked on Friday, has disclosed additional “suspicious addresses” to which a hacker sent around $10.7 million worth of Bitcoin. Tallying up all cryptocurrency addresses shared by the Singapore-based exchange brings the total amount lost in the hack to $203 million. (The true damage may be higher, should KuCoin share additional addresses).
But at the same time, cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain projects have frozen some of the stolen assets to minimize the damage. And they’ve done a pretty comprehensive job.
Orion Protocol has updated its smart contract to render $8.5 million stolen tokens obsolete, Covesting has frozen the $520,000 stolen, and KardiaChain has invalidated $9 million worth of tokens.
Crypto company Velo Labs announced that it will invalidate all of the 122 million VELO tokens stolen in the hack, worth about $76 million. VIDT Datalink will freeze 14 million VIDT, worth about $6.4 million. SilentNotary will replace all of its tokens, including the $94,692 affected, and Ocean Protocol paused its smart contract after $8.6 million was lost.
Tether, the stablecoin company that produces an eponymous US dollar-pegged coin, froze $22 million worth of the cryptocurrency. (No word yet on what will happen to the penis.finance, PUMPANOMICS, RETARD TOKEN, The Hunger Game and Dino Token that ended up in the hacker's wallet).
This means that crypto projects have frozen or rendered obsolete—or intend to do so about $130 million of stolen funds, or 65% of the haul so far, according to information disclosed by KuCoin. That makes it difficult for the hacker to sell those funds on secondary markets and ruin the fragile economies of smaller tokens.
But not impossible. Some of those assets haven't been frozen yet, and today the hacker started to launder some of the money. The hacker has sold a couple of thousand dollars worth of Ocean tokens on decentralized exchanges Uniswap in exchange for Ethereum, and trace amounts of Synthetix and Ampleforth have also left the suspicious Ethereum wallet.
Despite all of this, KuCoin is still out of pocket of at least $200 million. It says its insurance fund is large enough to cover all of its users. It estimates that withdrawals and deposits will return within a week.