KuCoin has recovered 84% of affected funds in $280M hack, co-founder says

KuCoin, the crypto exchange that suffered from a $280 million hack in September, has recovered a majority of the affected assets, according to its co-founder.

Johnny Lyu, KuCoin's co-founder and CEO, said in a Tweet on Wednesday that 84% of the affected assets have been recovered via "approaches like on-chain tracking, contract upgrade and judicial recovery." 

He added that the details of the recovering process can't be disclosed until the case is closed as per requirement from law enforcements. Lyu said KuCoin has so far resumed the services for 176 tokens on the platform and the services for all remaining assets will resume before November 22. 

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A majority of KuCoin's stolen funds in September were ERC-20 tokens (worth $147 million), Stellar tokens (worth $87 million) and bitcoin (worth $30 million).

The Block reported previously that within days after the hack, over $160 million worth of tokens had already been recovered through either protocol projects' forking, redeploying the contracts or blocking the hacker's address. 

Lyu's note comes about 6 days after the KuCoin hacker's Ethereum address initiated dozens of transactions with ERC-20 tokens to another Ethereum address that starts with 0xd32dbed, which now has a balance of $13.6 million worth of ERC-20 tokens.

Hours before Lyu's Tweet on Wednesday, the 0xd32dbed address further sent several transactions with ERC-20 tokens to another address that starts with 0xd6216fc, which currently has a balance of over $110 million worth of ERC-20 tokens. 

About Author

Wolfie joined The Block’s news team in 2020 and switched to the research side in 2021 to focus on crypto mining analysis. Prior to The Block, he had been a journalist at CoinDesk for three years. Wolfie has a background in financial journalism.