According to blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic, the troubled FTX exchange’s accounts were raided for more than $663 million in various crypto assets elevating the hacker to the rank of “Ether ETH whale.”.
Elliptic estimated that $477 million of this was stolen, with a significant portion of those tokens being converted into ETH, and that FTX itself put $186 million worth of more than a hundred distinct tokens into secure storage.
In what researchers referred to as “on-chain spoofing,” the attacker was still draining wallets four days later, as reported on Nov. 15.
Beosin, a blockchain security company, reports that as of Nov. 15, the attacker held almost $338 million in cryptocurrency after carrying out several swaps and cross-chain transactions throughout the previous day.
According to the wallet address, there are a massive 228,523 ETH included, which, at the current market price, would be worth almost $288.8 million.
According to the amount of ETH possessed, this places the account known as the “FTX Accounts Drainer” as the 35th largest Ethereum holder.
The Beacon Chain deposit contract, which holds almost 15 million ETH, is the largest holder of Ethereum, according to CoinCarp’s wealth 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 quantity of ETH is held by the top 20 ETH wallets, and a third is held by the top 50 wallets.
Both FTX and FTX.US were the targets of the exploits which led many people to believe 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 possible unloading of Ether’s 35th-largest holding flooding the markets hasn’t had an effect on pricing.
According to CoinGecko, ETH was trading unchanged for the day at $1,245 at the time of writing. Since the FTX shambles started, the asset has dropped by about 23%.
