On November 20, the hacker of the FTX Exchange became active and transferred approximately 50,000 ETH between wallets. These coins are worth around $60 million. The hacker did not transfer all these stolen funds in one go. The total span of these transfers lasted over a 4-hour time frame. A total of 5000 ETH was transferred initially followed by a transfer of 10,000 ETH. Finally, the remaining 25,000 ETH was transferred to another wallet.
FTX Wallet Drainer is now the 37th largest holder of ETH
Dropped 10 places after transferring 50,000 ETH to 0x866E this morning 👀
We’re also continuing to see ETH swapped for renBTC in 0x866E
Wallet currently holds ~1127 renBTC and ~19k ETH pic.twitter.com/sPJjtoWwud
— CertiK Alert (@CertiKAlert) November 20, 2022
Around the time of the FTX hack, the involvement of 2 parties is widely believed. One of the two is described as a black hat who managed to disappear with $447 million. The other one was a white hat who was responsible for moving assets worth more than $186 million to cold storage. Despite this, many people believe that the person involved in the FTX asset transfer is the black hat behind this incident.
Most analysts actually believe that the trails left by the black hat were entirely different from all the other addresses that withdrew from FTX. However, the techniques used by the FTX hacker are different every time. It cancels the possibility of the involvement of the securities regulator. Money laundering, in any type of form, would be highly unusual for a government agency to be involved in.
FTX- A Nightmare for Ethereum and the Overall Crypto Industry
With 50,000 ETH in his hands, the FTX hacker took a step ahead by bridging portions of the stolen cryptocurrency using RenBridge. Explained in a simple manner, it is a blockchain-based bridging platform that is owned and controlled by Alameda research.
The hacker continuously swapped a great percentage of the stolen ETH and managed to bridge around 692 renBTC. It is worth mentioning that the FTX wallet drainer is still the 37th largest holder of ETH.
As soon as the hacker was done swapping ETH for renBTC, the exploiter bridged the tokens and exchanged them for native BTC. It is expected that this will continue to happen until all of the 50,000 ETH are swapped for BTC.
As a direct result of such a hack, ETH has suffered another downturn. It has fallen below the $1,200 mark. At the time of writing, the altcoin is trading at approximately $1,123. However, if the selling does not stop soon, ETH’s prices could be impacted further.
