Ex-Paxful CEO’s Bitcoin marketplace Noones exploited for nearly $8m, ZachXBT says

Peer-to-peer marketplace Noones may have been exploited for $7.9 million, with stolen funds routed through Tornado Cash.

Noones, a Bitcoin (BTC) peer-to-peer marketplace founded by Paxful’s ex-CEO Ray Youssef, appears to have suffered a big hack. In early January, suspicious outflows drained around $7.9 million from the platform’s hot wallets on Ethereum (ETH), TRON (TRX), Solana (SOL), and BNB Chain (BNB), on-chain sleuth ZachXBT wrote in a Telegram post on Jan. 24.

The blockchain investigator revealed the incident, showing hundreds of transactions, each under $7,000, as the funds were siphoned off. The stolen funds were bridged between Ethereum and BNB Chain before being funneled into Tornado Cash, a crypto mixer often used to obscure the trail of stolen funds.

The timing also raised eyebrows. Noones had announced maintenance around the same time as the hack, but, as ZachXBT noted, “no official statement was made about any security incident.” As of press time, Noones made no public statements on the matter.

Noones came onto the scene in 2023, launched by Ray Youssef, who previously co-founded Paxful, another name in peer-to-peer crypto trading. Youssef saw Noones as a more community-driven alternative to Paxful, designed to give users easier access to crypto and digital payments while steering clear of some of the challenges he seemed to face at Paxful.