The hacker who made a tidy profit by taking advantage of the now-defunct FTX exchange last week has moved them to Ether.
According to blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic, the troubled FTX exchange’s wallets were raided for more than $663 million in various crypto assets just one day after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Elliptic believed that $477 million of this was stolen, with a significant portion of those tokens being converted into ETH, and that FTX itself moved $186 million worth of more than a hundred different tokens into secure storage.
FTX hacker was using on-chain spoofing
Four days later, the attacker was still stealing money from victims through a technique called “on-chain spoofing.”
Beosin, a blockchain security company, reports that as of Nov. 15, the attacker held about $338 million in cryptocurrency after carrying out numerous swaps and cross-chain transactions over the previous day.
According to the wallet address, there are a whopping 228,523 ETH included, which, at the current market price, would be worth about $288.8 million.
According to the amount of ETH held, this places the account known as the “FTX Accounts Drainer” as the 35th largest Ethereum holder.
The Beacon Chain deposit contract, which holds about 15 million ETH, is the largest holder of Ethereum, according to CoinCarp’s rich list. Additionally, the majority of the top 20 are Decentralized Finance (DeFi) bridges, layer-2 protocols, and cryptocurrency exchanges.
27.7% of the total circulating supply of ETH is held by the top 20 ETH wallets, and a third is held by the top 50 wallets.
Since the exploits affected both FTX and FTX.US, many people theorized that it might have been an inside job. Hugh Brooks, director of security operations at the analytics company Certik, hinted at on-chain evidence to support this. On Nov. 15, he told Cointelegraph that it was impossible to rule out an insider with access to these wallets moving the money absent a private key compromise. The potential offloading of Ether’s 35th-largest holder flooding the markets hasn’t had an effect on price.
ETH is currently trading at $1,249.21 with no major movements in the last 24 hours.