Analyst traces $100M laundering trail through gas payments, leaving Zcash privacy intact

Researcher Tayvano has traced roughly $100 million to $103 million in stolen crypto tied to a supply-chain attack on Ledger hardware wallets sold through CryptoBilis. She was careful to say how she did it: Zcash’s privacy was not broken. The trail came from gas payments. The attacker covered transaction fees from an associated wallet, and that one habit tied the operation together. How the trail came together The scale of the theft is large. The research findings put the Ledger drainer incident at approximately $103.4 million in stolen assets. Those funds were spread across roughly 530 addresses on seven different blockchains. About three-quarters of the looted value sat in USDT on the Tron network. The rest was spread across other chains and assets. Investigators also identified wallets holding approximately $38.6 million in ETH and $16.9 million in BTC. Tether, the issuer of USDT, froze $10 million of the stablecoin linked to the theft. According to the research findings, the attacker’s decision to use an affiliated wallet for gas payments became the main link between the many addresses. By analyzing who funded those fees, researchers mapped out the attacker’s infrastructure. Wha...