Over $100 Million Missing: CoinBene Claims Maintenance, a Month of Questions Point Toward a Hack

Curious detailsOn March 27, 2019, the day after CoinBene's maintenance announcement, data scientists at Elementus - a blockchain infrastructure firm - published a report that described the fund transfers out of CoinBene's hot wallet bore all the hallmarks of a hack.

CoinBene reportedly suffered a hack, had $118.6 million worth of a particular token spared in the suspected attack but finally ended up with $200 million worth of that same token after the fact - all within the space of three days.

Howdoo.io: How 18 million UDOO disappeared in the CoinBene hackIn an interview with Cointelegraph, David Brierley, the CEO of Howdoo, one of the projects affected in the alleged theft, provided two weeks' correspondence between his company and a representative of CoinBene listed as a manager on the platform's LinkedIn page.

According to the correspondence, the March 25 incident saw 18.4 million UDOO removed from the CoinBene hot wallet.

Suddenly, on March 28, 2019, CoinBene put out an announcement saying the Howdoo project was undergoing maintenance.

"The UDOO project are doing maintenance upgrades recently. CoinBene has suspended UDOO's trading function already. After the completion of the upgrade and maintenance, the transaction function will be opened and the specific time will be announced separately."

The conversation with the individual yielded little result, as the CoinBene employee simply asked Brierley to facilitate an 18.4 million UDOO transfer from Howdoo's treasury to cover the lost tokens.

Brierley told Cointelegraph that CoinBene later sent another offer for Howdoo to provide the 18.4 million udoo for a knocked-down price of $50,000, to which Howdoo declined.

CoinBene and MXM: More questions than answersJudging solely based on the experiences described by the Howdoo team, it would seem that CoinBene cover up the fact that it suffered a hack.

Did MaxiMine spot CoinBene a whopping $77 million to cover the damages from the suspected hack? If so, do both companies share any sort of affiliation? Also, why was maximine the only token not completely drained by the suspected hacker? And finally, why was 18.4 million udoo sent back to Howdoo's smart contract to be burned off?