FTX hacker still holds $339M in cryptos and yet…

It has been three days since FTX fell victim to a hack shortly after the Bahamas-based crypto-exchange filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. The hacker siphoned more than $600M from the exchange’s wallets on 12 November. 

The white hat angle

It was soon revealed that the actual exploit was close to $400 million, with the rest being moved by FTX officials in light of the suspicious drainage of funds.

Later that day, FTX General Counsel Ryne Miller revealed,

“Following the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings – FTX US and FTX [dot] com initiated precautionary steps to move all digital assets to cold storage.  Process was expedited this evening – to mitigate damage upon observing unauthorized transactions.”

The same was corroborated by popular on-chain sleuth Zachxbt on Twitter, along with addresses of both the black hat and the white hat withdrawals. 

Hacker still holds over $330 million

Blockchain intelligence firm Arkham Intelligence has published a detailed report of the transactions involved in this multi-million dollar hack. 

As per Arkham’s investigation, the initial recipient of the exploited funds dumped a significant portion of the tokens, indicating a sense of panic given the crypto being lost to slippage. 

In a bid to prevent said slippage, the perpetrator proceeded to swap the tokens using decentralized exchange aggregators including 1inch and DODO exchange. The swapped tokens were then sold in small batches of PAXG, LINK and MATIC ranging between $1.73 million and $3.90 million. 

Following the blacklisting of four of their addresses by Paxos, the hacker attempted to bridge from multiple networks. These attempts proved futile as Paxos ultimately froze the funds totaling almost $20 million. 

As of now, the hacker holds almost $339 million spread across 7 cryptocurrencies. $215 million in ETH, $48 million worth of DAI, $41 million in BNB, $7 million DAI on BSC, $4 million USDT, $3.8 million in MATIC, along with $20 million worth of frozen PAXG. 

Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptic tweets

The former crypto-billionaire behind this bankrupt crypto-empire has been posting some rather strange tweets. While the Twitter community was confused at first, some have now suggested that the broken up words on Sam Bankman-Fried’s wall are an attempt to trick the Twitter bot into not noticing the tweets deleted by him by keeping the total tweet count consistent. 

Users who scrolled down on SBF’s Twitter acct. found a number of misleading tweets. Some of them suggested that FTX was solvent and was not facing liquidity issues, with each of them later deleted too.