What happened to HTX’s 700 million missing TRX?
Back in June, proof-of-reserves for Justin Sun-owned HTX revealed a roughly-700 million drop in the quantity of TRX held at the exchange.
At today’s prices, these 700 million tokens are worth about $238 million.
A substantial portion of these assets ended up flowing into an address that supports Sun-owned Poloniex’s Super Representative, while some went to Binance.
Since then, HTX has been sanctioned by the European Union and the United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, making the location of HTX funds extraordinarily important.
Additionally, in the same proof-of-reserves where it disclosed the drop in TRX, it also reduced its disclosure for over $1 billion worth of other assets, now pointing towards an undisclosed “ThirdParty” custodian.
Protos was previously able to track a large portion of HTX’s Ethereum reserves to Poloniex.
Read more: Justin Sun’s Poloniex and HTX withdraw huge amounts from AAVE
We’ve since been able to track a portion of the TRX flow out of HTX before that June proof-of-reserves.
Specifically, in May, HTX moved 700 million TRX out of TAuUCiH4JVNBZmDnEDZkXEUXDARdGpXTmX, labeled as “HTX-Cold 6” and disclosed in the HTX proof-of-reserves.
This TRX was sent to multiple other addresses that we were able to identify.
Two hundred million of these tokens were sent to TPznYuGCgYSWW8boAnFVMvv3RhNKqFaVpL.
These tokens were then forwarded to TFTWNgDBkQ5wQoP8RXpRznnHvAVV8x5jLu, an address which is labeled as “HTX 4” on Tronscan, which is also an address that was included in the proof-of-reserves (but has since been removed and never included TRX in its disclosed assets).
Of these 200 million tokens, 180 million were sent in two transactions to TEF9ZVUxhmGGffvkf59e2vdLfAG1QCMb7B (TEF9).
This unlabeled address currently votes 928 million TRX for the Poloniex Super Representative.
Returning to the other 500 million tokens, those funds were sent to TT2T17KZhoDu47i2E4FWxfG79zdkEWkU9N (TT2).
This is a notorious and controversial address.
Arkham Intelligence tags it as “Justin Sun?” It’s also an important redeemer of TrueUSD, a stablecoin deeply connected to Sun.
TT2 has delegated energy to HTX 4 before.
However, it’s worth noting that Sun has been evasive when asked about this address by Bloomberg previously.
However, the day before these funds came in, TT2 made some interesting transactions.
It started by sending 100 million TRX to TEgMTsmbVbjGK9bSeEjkZmcE8EFW8iJ8RT, which immediately sent 100 million TRX to HTX 4.
HTX 4 then forwarded those funds to TGPeN3mRTtYaAPvkPH2RJYwUQVcjYvMRS3.
These funds were then forwarded to TDqSquXBgUCLYvYC4XZgrprLK589dkhSCf, an address that TRONScan labels as Binance-Hot 7.
So before receiving 500 million TRX out of the HTX reserves, it sent 100 million TRX to Binance.
That wasn’t the only interesting set of transfers out of TT2 that day.
It also sent 180 million TRX to TBRoa9xabNSTXTSK6iQAMPQQ7CNo2j2yuF.
This address quickly forwarded these funds to HTX 4.
HTX 4 then sent these funds onward, again, in two transactions to TEF9.
It also sent 35 million TRX to TT2, in some sense creating a loop of funds.
Broadly, this shows millions of dollars in TRX moving from HTX to a variety of addresses, including one address that supports Poloniex.
They also moved in a pattern similar to the stETH that Protos previously tracked out of HTX, including the use of briefly used burners.
However, we should note that these represent less than 10% of the total TRX held at HTX, and the most recent disclosure claims a total of 9.3 billion TRX, with 922 million of those currently lent on JustLend.
Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.