The husk of fallen crypto exchange FTX can’t do much now but try to get its hands on whatever lingering funds it can scrutinize, and quarantine them somewhere where they can be found. Can’t be randomly moved or switched off by a hacker. This comes after a flurry of information that surfaced in the past that paint a picture of a financial institution full of chaos on every possible level, in unprecedented amounts.
FTX founder and newly resigned CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, for his part, is “really sorry.”
On Saturday, Bankman-Fried (who also goes by SBF) dismissed rumors circulating on Friday that he had fled to South America. He still claims to be in the Bahamas, where FTX is headquartered.
At least $1 billion worth of customer cryptocurrencies apparently disappeared from FTX. And as a cherry on top, on Friday night, FTX may have been infiltrated by hackers and robbed of $473 million. What the company is left with, according to its own technical support channel, is a largely unusable and potentially insecure website that can steal users’ money.
Backtracking a bit: According to unnamed sources who spoke to Reuters and wall street journal Yesterday, Bankman-Fried moved the equivalent of $10 billion from FTX to an FTX-affiliated trading house called Alameda Research by Bankman-Fried, which is now down.
It now appears that the movement of funds by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao played a role. The Now-Infamous Anti-FTX TweetstormIn which he announced to millions of people that “recent revelations” have caused his company to essentially lose all confidence in FTX.
But the newly-revealed missing $1 billion appears to be an unaccounted portion of the $10 billion that was transferred to Alameda. Both FTX and Alameda Research were already under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission when all this was made public.
Amidst those revelations late Friday night – or, who knows, maybe That’s why Among them—an additional announcement came on the company’s tech support Telegram account: “FTX has been hacked. FTX apps are malware. Remove them. Chat is open. Do not visit the FTX site as it may download trojans. “
giving extra credibility to Telegram messages was a Tweet from FTX General Counsel Rain Miller“Investigating abnormalities with wallet movements related to consolidation of FTX balances across exchanges,” he added.
Pure speculation from high-profile accounts on Crypto Twitter has informed that the hack is indeed an FTX insider or insider, On their way out the door they dismember whatever they can from FTX’s corpse.
Saturday Afternoon ET, Miller tweeted a statement John Ray, newly appointed Crisis CEO of FTX, tasked with stabilizing the spiraling company.
According to Ray, the company is now seeking to “secure all assets wherever they are located” due to the “unauthorized access”. FTX, according to Ray, is now going about the task of shutting down trading and fund withdrawals and moving all crypto to “cold wallet custodians” where funds cannot be easily accessed, but at least They will not suddenly disappear.
Oh and the soldiers have been informed, according to Ray’s statement. And in addition to law enforcement, an internal “fact review and mitigation exercise” was immediately launched in response to the hack, he explained.
In other words: FTX is trying to find the person who did this.
