Zcash Remains Private Amid $100M Gas Payment Laundering Trail

Background

Researcher Tayvano has traced a $100M to $103M laundering trail through gas payments, revealing a supply-chain attack on Ledger hardware wallets sold through CryptoBilis.

How the Trail Came Together

The scale of the theft is large. The research findings put the Ledger drainer incident at approximately $103.4 million in stolen assets. Those funds were spread across roughly 530 addresses on seven different blockchains. About three-quarters of the looted value sat in USDT on the Tron network. The rest was spread across other chains and assets. Investigators also identified wallets holding approximately $38.6 million in ETH and $16.9 million in BTC.

What Happened on the Zcash Side

Zcash is a privacy coin. Its shielded transactions are designed to hide the sender, the receiver and the amount from public view.

The News

Tayvano stressed that those protections held. Nobody cracked the underlying math. Instead, the Zcash portion of the trail was traced by matching 108 exact value exits to incoming batches. In plain terms, funds went into the shielded pool in certain amounts and came out in identical amounts, and the pattern lined up.

Background: A Supply-Chain Attack, Not a Wallet Hack

The theft traces back to Ledger hardware wallets sold via CryptoBilis. That makes it a supply-chain attack, where the compromise happens somewhere along the path between the product and the buyer.

Once the Funds Were Drained, the Attacker Had a Familiar Problem

Stolen crypto is visible on public ledgers, so the goal becomes scattering it, swapping it and routing parts of it through privacy tools until the trail goes cold.

Spreading Value Across Roughly 530 Addresses and Seven Chains Fits That Playbook

What This Means

For stablecoin issuers, Tether's $10 million freeze shows a different kind of leverage. With about three-quarters of the stolen value sitting in USDT on Tron, a centrally issued token gave investigators a choke point that a decentralized asset would not.

For Investigators, the Case Reinforces That Metadata Often Matters More Than Encryption

Fee funding, timing and amount patterns can link addresses even when the transactions themselves are hidden.

The Remaining Questions

How much of the roughly $103.4 million can actually be recovered, and whether the identified ETH and BTC holdings can be frozen or seized, will determine whether this tracing work turns into money back in victims' pockets.