HTX Accused of Mixing Reserves with Poloniex

HTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, has been hit with sanctions from the European Union and the UK's Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office. In response to these measures, HTX began rapidly rotating its on-chain addresses, making it difficult to identify its holdings.

The situation was complicated by HTX changing its proof-of-reserves, which obscured the location of its reserves in a new 'ThirdParty' category. This category is supposed to describe funds held at third-party custodians, but HTX has failed to disclose the identity of this custodian.

Protos attempted to track the stETH in one of HTX's addresses and found that it was transferred through several addresses labeled as Poloniex 7, 10, and 9. One of these addresses, 0x176F3DAb24a159341c0509bB36B833E7fdd0a132, was previously labeled as 'Justin Sun 4' on Etherscan.

This pattern of transactions suggests that HTX has been mixing its reserves with Poloniex's funds. This is not the first time HTX has relied heavily on Poloniex to hold certain assets, particularly tokenized BTC worth hundreds of millions of dollars.