Justin Sun Says Customer Assets Are 100% Safe Despite $200 Million Hacked From Exchanges

Customer deposits at sibling crypto exchanges HTX and Poloniex are “100% safe” despite multiple recent hacks, according to Justin Sun – the owner of both platforms.

In conversation with CoinDesk, said that both platforms have recovered from the hack, and have already resumed user withdrawals for the vast majority of their assets.

“I think for HTX, we have already resumed 95% in terms of USD worth of assets,” said Sun. “On Poloniex, we have resumed around 85% in terms of the USD value of the assets.”

In early November, Poloniex lost $125 million from its hot wallet after a hacker pilfered a wide assortment of over 175 different tokens from the exchange. At the time, Sun confirmed that such losses were “within manageable limits” and could be covered for users with the exchange’s revenue.

Later that month, the HTX-controlled HECO chain lost $86.6 million after its bridge to the Ethereum network was drained by hackers. Again, Sun promised that all losses would be reimbursed using exchange revenue, which allegedly totaled over $200 million in Q3 alone.

“Since we have already covered all of the loss of tokens in the platform, on HTX and Poloniex, 100% of assets are 100% safe,“ Sun told CoinDesk. “Even though in terms of exchanges itself, we need to basically earn those profits in the future. But for customer assets, it’s 100% safe.”

An HTX spokesperson added that the lost funds represented only a “small fraction” of the exchange’s total reserves, and that the company could continue operating.

Justin Sun’s Influence

Due to withdrawal restrictions on certain altcoins, HTX and Poloniex have seen trading premiums for both Bitcoin (BTC) and Tron (TRX) – the assets for which withdrawals are enabled – as traders liquidate their small-cap positions to get their funds off the platform.

Sun has promised to compensate affected customers through a Tether (USDT) airdrop providing customers one stablecoin for every dollar worth of tokens held on the exchanges.

The billionaire’s influence in the crypto industry is vast: before launching Poloniex in 2019, Sun founded the Tron blockchain in 2017, which is now the 11th largest crypto with a market cap of over $9 billion.

Like many crypto founders, Sun now faces a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which alleged in March that Sun failed to disclose paid celebrity endorsements for Tron’s TRX and BTT tokens.