HTX has been hit with sanctions from the European Union and the United Kingdom’s Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office.
In the wake of these measures, TRM Labs highlighted that HTX had started rapidly rotating through addresses on-chain, making it harder to identify its holdings.
This problem was compounded by HTX choosing to change its proof-of-reserves, obscuring the location of its reserves in a new “ThirdParty” category that’s supposed to describe funds held at third-party custodians.
HTX claims that users can still verify the funds by reaching out to the custodians in question, but HTX has failed to respond to our requests for the identity of that custodian.
Read more: HTX moved $1.3 billion from reserves to undisclosed ‘ThirdParty’
Before these transitions, HTX published a proof-of-reserves that contained a variety of addresses.
Protos has attempted to track the stETH in one of those addresses to its final destination and believes that this path may revealing something about how HTX has been functioning.
Let’s start with the May 1 proof of reserves, which noted there were 71,853.22 stETH, at today’s price worth about $135 million, in the address 0x18709e89bd403f470088abdacebe86cc60dda12e.
On May 30, shortly before HTX was due to generate its June proof-of-reserves where funds were moved to “ThirdParty,” these funds were moved to 0x7C103bbAE0DA51AE929dE97A98633668ddE80d04.
Moments later, they were transferred to 0x8fCA4adE3a517133fF23ca55CdAea29C78C990b8, an address labeled on Etherscan as Poloniex 7.
Shortly after, they were transferred again to 0x29065a4C1f2F20d1E263930088890d6F49Fe715a, an address that Etherscan labels as Poloniex 10.
Finally, moments later, they were transferred to 0x176F3DAb24a159341c0509bB36B833E7fdd0a132, an address labeled on Etherscan as Poloniex 9.
This address, 0x176F3DAb24a159341c0509bB36B833E7fdd0a132, used to be labeled as “Justin Sun 4” on Etherscan before being listed as a Poloniex address.
This pattern of transactions shows a large quantity of funds moving from HTX to a Poloniex address where they have been commingled with the Poloniex reserves.
Read more: Poloniex and the $1.3B bitcoin question
The wrapped BTC wrinkle
This isn’t the first time that HTX has relied heavily on Poloniex to hold certain assets.
Often, more than half the BTC held at HTX has been in a tokenized form, specifically a tokenized form that seemed to be held by Poloniex.
This often represented hundreds of millions of dollars worth of value.
Poloniex was unwilling to disclose the addresses where it presumably (hopefully) holds that BTC to Protos.
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