Two million BNB coins worth around $590 million were transferred to a freshly constructed wallet to an address blacklisted by Tether, as reported by Cryptoslate.
The blacklisting was publicised on Twitter by a Tether bot, fuelling speculation about one of the year’s major hacks. CZ, the CEO of Binance, had not commented on the transaction as of the time of publication. His final tweet, an hour before the information became public, wrote, “it’s not about cash flow; it’s crypto flow.” Since the tweet, about $500 million in BNB has passed through a now-blacklisted wallet.
Green Jeff on Twitter suggested that the receiving wallet had bridged BNB tokens and then used the cash to make a leveraged DeFi trade. This conclusion was reached by CryptoSlate’s investigation as well, as on-chain data shows a huge deposit to Venus trading tokens for stablecoins using BNB as collateral, as reported by Cryptoslate.
Green Jeff’s further investigation, however, showed that the Tether blacklisting may indicate nefarious conduct. While Green Jeff noted that the “activity does not appear to be a hack,” he questioned why Tether was moving quicker than Binance. If this is tied to an exploit, he speculated that Binance itself could be the victim.
Another possibility is that the Ethereum in the wallet was transferred to Tornado Cash. However, only about 20% of the wallet’s total value has been converted to ETH, as reported by Cryptoslate.
Cryptoslate further noted that The price of BNB dropped by 5% when the wallet became live, wiping off the gains it had gained from the beginning of October.
There has been no indication that the occurrence was caused by a hack or vulnerability. However, more research is needed. The BNB chain has now been halted, indicating that a malevolent actor is at work.
(With insights from Cryptoslate)
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