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Why Pro-Israel Group’s $90M Crypto Hack Could Be a Hammer Blow for Iran’s Regime
Iranian cryptocurrency exchange Nobitex was hacked for around $90 million on Wednesday, on the surface of it an almost routine exploit in an industry that already dealt with a $223 million exchange exploit earlier this month.
Below the surface, it was anything but. Digging a little deeper reveals this was not simply a cash grab, in fact, not a cash grab at all, but a political message that could end up being a hammer blow to one of the primary combatants in the escalating conflict in the Middle East.
The hackers, the pro-Israel activist group Gonjeshke Darande, demonstrated their indifference to monetary gain by transferring the stolen funds to a series of inaccessible «vanity» wallets ladened with the words like «terrorist,» essentially burning those tokens forever.
Politically motivated sabotage
«This appears to be an act of politically motivated sabotage rather than a financially motivated hack,» Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson said in an interview. «The use of vanity addresses seems to be motivated by wanting to send a message to Nobitex and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.»
The group, whose Farsi name means Predatory Sparrow, the following day leaked the exchange’s source code, leaving any remaining tokens on the platform vulnerable to theft.
«Bypassing sanctions doesn’t pay.» Gonjeshke Darande wrote on X alongside screenshots of the «vanity» wallets storing the stolen funds.
The regime has been under sanctions for years as due to international concerns over its human rights record and attempts to develop nuclear weapons. The European Union introduced sanctions in 2011 and has renewed them every year since, even strengthening them in the meantime. U.S. sanctions date back as far as 1979, to the Iranian Revolution.
Israel said Iran, which has has vowed to eliminate the Jewish state numerous times over the years, was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. Iran says its program is purely peaceful. Last week, immediately before Israel’s air strikes, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had violated its non-proliferation commitments.
Gonjeshke Darande’s tweet refers to allegations about Iran’s use of cryptocurrency to evade the sanctions, echoing concerns Senators Elizabeth Warren and Angus King raised to former U.S. President Joe Biden in 2024.
Without Nobitex, Iran, a nation already hamstrung by oil and financial sanctions, may struggle to move capital around in a time of intense conflict. That could weaken its efforts to mobilize and launch attacks into Israel,.
The truth about vanity wallets
There has been some discussion about the vanity wallets. Does the group have access to the filched tokens, or have they been burned forever?
There is «practically zero chance attackers control these addresses,» Yehor Rudytsia, a security researcher at Hacken, told CoinDesk.
Creating the vanity addresses with a private key to unlock them «is computationally trivial task and might be done in micro/milliseconds,» Rudytsia said. But finding the 26-character private key would require as many as ~ 2¹⁵² trials. «It is practically infeasible to find the private key which maps to such a public address.»
Which means the money has gone.
Shares of Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase (COIN) rose 43% this month, making the firm the top performer in the S&P 500 since it joined the index at the end of last month.
June’s run is already the stock’s best since November and caps three straight monthly gains. Coinbase’s shares reached their highest level since their public debut.
COIN hit a $382 high this week before enduring a slight correction, ending the week at $353 and seeing a slight 0.7% drop in after-hours trading to $351.
The wider S&P 500 index rose roughly 5% in June as geopolitical tensions eased.
Washington’s progress on the GENIUS Act, Congress’s first rulebook for dollar-pegged stablecoins, helped shift investor focus from trading fees to stablecoin revenue.
The bill brightened the outlook for Circle, whose shares hit a record high and saw its market cap near that of Coinbase this week.
Coinbase keeps all yield on USDC balances held on its platform and nearly half of other USDC income, equal to about 99 percent of Circle’s revenue, giving shareholders indirect exposure at no added cost, CNBC reported Friday, citing analysts including Citizens’ head of financial technology research Devin Ryan.
Trading, however, remains subdued. Average daily volume on Coinbase has drifted lower since April.
Robinhood (HOOD) has introduced micro futures on bitcoin (BTC), solana (SOL) and XRP in the United States., expanding its existing crypto futures offering for its nearly 26 million funded accounts.
Micro contracts need far less collateral than full-size futures, letting traders take directional positions while committing a smaller slice of capital.
The contracts offer traders more flexibility to bet on a cryptocurrency’s future price direction or hedge current positions given their smaller size.
The launch rounds out a futures suite that began with BTC and ETH in January. It also comes weeks after the firm closed its $200 million purchase of Bitstamp and finalized a $179 million deal for Canada’s WonderFi.
Robinhood’s data shows that crypto notional volumes have exploded upward over time, reaching $11.7 billion in May. The figure marks a 36% rise month-over-month, and a 65% growth year-over-year.
XRP climbed 5.5% to $2.19 in the last 24 hours after a trio of catalysts converged to help the cryptocurrency outperform the wider cryptocurrency market.
One of the catalysts was launch of XRP micro futures on Robinhood. The contracts offer traders more flexibility to bet on the cryptocurrency’s future price direction or hedge current positions given their smaller size.
Regulatory fog also thinned. On Friday, Ripple withdrew its cross-appeal in its long-running U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit. The SEC sued Ripple back in 2020 over its XRP sales, alleging these violated securities laws. The SEC is expected to drop its own appeal, leaving last year’s ruling, ordering Ripple to pay a $125 million civil penalty to the SEC, intact. The move could lift a lid that had kept some investors on the sidelines.
On-chain data rounded out the bullish setup. The XRP Ledger logged over a 1.1 million active addresses over the past week according to crypto analyst Ali Martinez, who cited Glassnode data.
XRP’s rise saw it outperform the wider crypto market, with the broader CoinDesk 20 (CD20) index rising 1.7% in the last 24 hours.
Coinbase Outpaces S&P 500 With 43% June Rise as Stablecoin Narrative Grows: CNBC
Robinhood Launches Micro Bitcoin, Solana and XRP Futures Contracts
Why is XRP Up Today? Trio of Catalysts Sees Token Outperform Wider Crypto Market
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