On-chain sleuth ZachXBT, a Crypto Investigative Researcher in a Twitter post claimed DPRK (North Korea) just finished laundering another $17.7m+ (11304 ETH) from the Harmony Bridge hack.
Who’s active rn?
DPRK just finished laundering another $17.7m+ (11304 ETH) from the Harmony Bridge hack.
S/o to the exchanges who responded quickly on a weekend so funds could be frozen. pic.twitter.com/sUyUScHR4N
— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) January 29, 2023
Due to the swift intervention of some Crypto exchanges who responded quickly on a weekend so funds could be frozen.
The two main addresses who transferred funds to six exchanges can be seen below;
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Two weeks ago, the North Korea’s Lazarus Group had a very busy weekend moving $63.5m (~41000 ETH) from the Harmony bridge hack through Railgun before consolidating funds and depositing on three different exchanges
In a similar twist, an exploit occurred on the Swapleonicorn Bridge; a hacker found the arbitrage and had stolen ~300k worth of $BNB to RailGun, this was a heavy hit for the project. They deposited $63m and instantly withdrew.
The Railgun team were celebrating this influx of funds several times and even put it out on their announcement-only channel. Railgun stakers, the biggest of which being Edward Fricker who runs the project, will now be directly profiting off the movement of illicit funds.
This action of making money off of illicit funds being moved is one of the reasons prosecutors arrested Alexey Pertsevand is exactly why Tornado Cash got sanctioned. Also, Railgun transactions interact with unverified contracts that match Hermez’s L2 rollup. Not even on-chain.
Another main address of 5974 ETH was discovered by ZachXBT through Breadcrumbs bringing the total laundered by DPRK in past few hours to $27.18m (17278 ETH)
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FBI confirms North Korea’s involvement in $100M crypto theft from Harmony Horizon Bridge. Hackers used social engineering to deceive employees into downloading rogue apps as part of recruitment scam.
Harmony $ONE network usage and overall financial performance also declined for the second quarter, this quarter’s decline was catalyzed by the Horizon Bridge hack that occurred on June 23, 2022. This incident resulted in the bridge being drained of $100 million in assets from the Ethereum and BNB chains. This breach only exacerbated the decrease in network activity following Defikingdoms decision to launch on an Avalanche subnet in Q2.
Harmony core team committed to 0% minting to prevent token dilution by using funds from the Harmony treasury to facilitate the recovery process.The team will allocate funds on an ongoing basis starting to strategic partners mechanisms to remove depegged assets from circulation.
Harmoney ONE Financial Overview
Daily user metrics were at their lowest in 12 months, down 87% from their peak in Q1 2022. Similarly, daily transactions were down 88% from their peak in Q4 2021. Despite the culmination of events, the circulating market cap grew (8.4%) for the first time this year during Q3.