All Eyes on Hacked FTX Funds, ETH Market

The crypto community is closely monitoring hacked FTX funds. 

After on-chain analysts observed the FTX hacker, dubbed “FTX Accounts Drainer,” dumping ether for bitcoin, the price of the ether started dipping.

At the time of writing, the price of ether has dropped by 6.2% in the past 24 hours and is currently trading at around $1,100, according to information compiled by Blockworks.

Market participants are concerned that the price of the token will continue to trend downwards based on the hacker’s activity.

Thanks to the blockchain, it’s possible to track the flow of funds in real-time via dapps such as Zerion.

Confusion over hacking trail

A day after FTX filed for bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried resigned from his position, Elliptic, a blockchain analytics unit, reported that $663 million in various tokens had been drained from the centralized exchange. 

Insiders noted that $186 million of those tokens were saved and moved into crypto cold storage, but the remaining $477 million was transferred to ether and stablecoin DAI. 

Over the past 24 hours, the hacker has been moving their ether in different lots, providing market indications that they could be planning to sell. 

As the community maintains a keen interest in the hacker’s next moves, FTX urges exchanges to cooperate by halting funds and returning them to “the bankruptcy estate.”

The fate of these millions has been the subject of much confusing reporting in non-crypto media.

MarketWatch, for example, attributed the full $477 million to the Bahamas government seizure.

CNBC cited a report from Elliptic referring to the Bahamian government action but neglected to update the story when Elliptic added — in the same blog post — “It is looking increasingly unlikely that the Bahamian [regulators] are in control of these particular assets.”

Instead, the best available information indicates that government officials in the Bahamas control less than a third of the total stolen cryptoassets.

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