The cryptocurrency exchange Poloniex, backed by Justin Sun, lost hundreds of millions in a theft.

On November 10th, according to PeckShield monitoring, a significant amount of assets were transferred out from addresses associated with Poloniex. Additionally, as per The Block Pro Headlines, assets worth approximately $50 million flowed out from Poloniex wallets.

Following the disclosure, Poloniex Customer Support posted on Platform X, stating that the exchange wallets had been disabled for maintenance. Once the wallets are reactivated, they will provide updated information.

Poloniex, one of the longest-operating

cryptocurrency

exchanges, was founded in 2013 and acquired by Circle in 2018. In June 2022, Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, announced the formal acquisition of the renowned exchange Poloniex in partnership with the Poloniex Foundation and several well-known investment institutions. Simultaneously, they introduced the Tron Exchange as the brand for their Chinese-speaking community.

As early as August 7, 2020, during the first Poloniex meetup in China, Justin Sun had revealed his position as an investor in Poloniex.

Justin Sun has stated that they are currently investigating the Poloniex hacking incident. Poloniex maintains a healthy financial state and commits to fully refunding the affected funds. They also plan to explore opportunities for collaboration with other exchanges to facilitate the recovery of these funds. Additionally, Sun encourages the hackers to promptly return the funds and offers a 5% reward as a white-hat bounty.

According to LookIntoChain's statistics, the Poloniex hackers managed to steal over $118 million in cryptocurrency. Here are the details of the stolen funds:

X-explore's post suggests that the attackers behind the Poloniex incident might be the Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacking organization. This group previously targeted Stake.com on September 4th, and the modus operandi of both attacks appears to be similar. Firstly, different tokens were stored in separate addresses, implying that each address handled a specific token. Secondly, intermediate addresses were used to swap ERC20/TRC20 tokens on decentralized exchanges before transferring ETH/TRX to new addresses.