CZ To Help HTX Track Stolen Funds, Appoints Binance Security Team to Investigate

HTX, formerly Huobi Global, was exploited recently for almost $8 million. Following the incident, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has offered his assistance in tracking the stolen funds.

Meanwhile, the exchange has tried to reduce the impact of the exploits on the network. It proposed 5% of the total stolen amount, worth approximately $400,000, as a ‘white-hat bonus,’ for the return of the funds.  

Binance CEO Promised To Track The Stolen Funds

A blockchain analytics firm, Cyvers, highlighted the attack on the HTX crypto exchange on September 24. According to the discovery, the hacker drained about 5,000 Ether (ETH) from one of the exchange’s hot wallets.

Also, the founder of Tron, Justin Sun, disclosed the exploit on the crypto exchange. However, he mentioned that the exchange had already covered the lost funds. Also, Sun reassured all customers about the safety of users’ assets on the exchange.

After the attack, Binance CEO CZ offered to help recover the stolen funds. CZ revealed his promise by responding to Justin Sun’s post on the X platform. CZ stated: “Our security team will help in tracking hacker funds in all cases where we can.”

The attack on the platform is coming just a week following its rebranding from Huobi to HTX. This is why Binance CEO teased Justin Sun on renaming the exchange before declaring his assistance over the exchange’s hack. CZ mentioned the similarity between Sun’s newly rebranded HTX and Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange. 

Both exchanges have suffered huge losses, but while HTX faced an exploit, FTX was alleged to be a scam.

HTX Offers 5% White-Hat Bounty To Hacker

The exchange has initiated a move to recover part of the stolen funds from the exploit. The exchange offered 5% of the stolen funds, worth almost $400,000, as a white-hat bounty for the hacker.

According to data from Etherscan.io, HTX also proposed an immunity for the hacker in Chinese. The exchange stated that the attack has seven days to comply by returning 95% of the stolen funds or face the law. 

Justin Sun also talked about the stance of the exchange to reduce the loss. He said:

$8 million represents a relatively small sum in comparison to the $3 billion worth of assets held by our users. It also amounts to just two weeks’ revenue for the HTX platform.

Further, Sun noted that he will conduct live streams in English and Chinese on discussions about HTX’s security. Meanwhile, HTX has also initiated real-time surveillance processes to evade a reoccurrence of such exploits.

Featured image from Pixabay and chart from TradingView.com