An emergency pause triggered after a THORChain user who deposited 10 ETH received two refunds also delayed the laundering of funds stolen from Binance, according to Chainalysis.
According to a Chainalysis statement reported by Wu Blockchain, the incident occurred after a chain reorganization on Ethereum on the morning of October 31, U.S. Eastern Daylight Time. THORChain’s erroneous double refund triggered an emergency pause on the platform.
The outage did not target only suspicious transactions. Cross-chain swaps were halted for all users on most of THORChain’s bridges. This also affected users seeking to swap assets on different blockchains through these channels.
Swap outage slowed the flow of stolen funds
Chainalysis reported that the pause unintentionally delayed the laundering of a significant amount of funds stolen in the Binance attack. Money launderers identified by the analytics firm as North Korean were also among those affected by the outage. The statement did not specify the amount of funds that were delayed.
This does not mean the stolen assets were recovered or permanently frozen; the reported outcome was that the laundering process was delayed when the swap channels in use were halted.
Converting funds into different assets had also come up after the Binance attack. We previously reported the conversion of 435 million USDT to Ethereum. In the latest incident, however, there was a separate service outage that affected other users as well, beyond the movement of funds.
Not investment advice.