VOT Research Desk
Market Analytics and Considerations
According to crypto intelligence platform Arkham Intelligence, the enigmatic looter of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, who is probably an insider according to a blockchain expert, holds $339 million worth of digital assets that they drained from the exchange late Friday.
Arkham discovered that the exploiter’s wallets contained $215 million worth of ETH, the native token of the Ethereum blockchain, $48 million worth of Maker’s stablecoin DAI, $44 million worth of BNB, the native token of the Binance ecosystem, $4 million worth of Tether’s USDT stablecoin on the Avalanche blockchain, and $3.8 million worth of MATIC on Polygon’s Matic bridge.
When U.S. authorities instructed Paxos to blacklist the accounts, the company frozen approximately $20 million in PAXG, a Paxos stablecoin linked to the price of gold. This prevented the owner from moving the tokens or cashing them out.
CoinDesk reported that late on Friday night, the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange owned by Sam Bankman-Fried experienced suspicious outflows totaling more than $600 million. Around $400 million was stolen from the cryptocurrency wallets of the exchange by a single party at the center of the exploit.
Three days have passed since the attack on FTX began. Paxos currently has 4 locations on its blacklist, and the intruder has regularly connected to and from numerous networks. Who knows what the FTX assailant will do next. A revision to their current token.
The attack occurred on the same day that FTX and the other 137 companies that made up Bankman-Fried’s crypto conglomerate filed for bankruptcy protection.
Arkham’s report says that the hacker acted hastily based on how they were acting on the blockchain. They converted tokens using UniSwap, 1inch, and CowSwap, among other decentralized exchanges. However, they struggled to dump coins like MATIC, LINK, and PAXG in smaller amounts to avoid slippage losses.
Arkham discovered that the attackers “appeared to be in panic” and “lost a large amount of their token holdings” when they moved assets across various chains to avoid detection after tracing their blockchain transactions. They also converted tokens to ETH and DAI on the Ethereum network, which are not easily sanctioned by authorities, likely in an effort to consolidate their holdings.
Miguel Morel, chief executive officer of Arkham Intelligence, disclosed this information to CoinDesk. “It is becoming more and more clear that the FTX exploiter is not very sophisticated.”They appear to have little in the way of a strategy as they have rushed to use the funds in any way they can.
Additionally, it appears that the attacker made at least one amateur error.Dyma Budorin, CEO of the blockchain security audit firm Hacken, claims that they blithely tapped their verified personal account on the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken to send sufficient TRX tokens to cover transaction fees.
The crude tactics suggest that there might be a chance to get the money back from the hacker.
