THORChain developer Pluto announces his departure after a vote to block North Korean hacker-linked transactions was reverted. A validator is also threatening to exit unless the protocol can stop the flow of hacker funds.
In a recent post, Pluto declared that he will “no longer be contributing to THORChain.” However, the core developer stated that he will “remain available to Nine Realms as long as I am needed” and vows to ensure a smooth handover of responsibilities.
Though Pluto did not specify the reason why he decided to leave the protocol, validator TCB quoted the developer’s post with his own stating they will also exit the protocol if the THORChain team fails to “rapidly adopt a solution to stop NK [North Korean hacker] flows.”
Earlier, TCB said that they were one of the three validators who had voted to stop Ethereum (ETH) trading on the protocol in order to stop the flow of funds from North Korean hacking group Lazarus Group.
On Feb. 27, THORChain developer Oleg Petrov confirmed that the vote was reverted “within minutes.”
Just a few days prior, Pluto had informed followers that the team was actively working towards implementing screening services to stop the flow of illicit funds from passing through the protocol.
According to data on LookOnChain, the Bybit hacker has been using THORChain to process stolen funds from one of the largest hacks ever committed in the crypto space. A post published on Feb. 28 indicated that the Bybit hacker has laundered a total of 270,000 ETH ($605 million) or equal to 54% of the stolen funds through the cross-chain swap protocol.
As previously reported by crypto.news, the flow of stolen funds from Bybit through the protocol boosted its trading volume to $2.91 billion and generated $3 million in fee revenue in just five days. At press time, the protocol’s daily trading volume has reached $650 million, when the average daily trading volume used to be $80 million before the Bybit hack.
THORChain founder’s response
THORChain founder John-Paul Thorbjornsen responded to the controversy regarding the reverted vote and the departure of developers on his X account. He stated that he had been the one to recommend nodes to continue trading.
In addition, he also claimed that none of the hacker addresses listed by the Office of Foreign Assets Control and FBI have ever interacted with THORChain and he has “not been served by any authority, nor aware of any node that has.”
“I will support my nodes to run a static deny list on OFAC/FBI lists if they feel comfortable, but I will not support a non-authority 3rd party dynamically updating the list at the protocol level,” said Thorbjornsen.
In a separate post, he said THORChain “does not launder money” and that traders can track the Ethereum to Bitcoin (BTC) swaps themselves and see where they end up.
“They typically go into CEX where they are swapped for fiat. Report the deposits to CEX,” wrote Thorbjornsen.
