Following FTX’s collapse, Alameda Research became inactive for four weeks, on December 28, 30 bitcoin wallets connected to Alameda Research started functioning, and overnight $1.7 million was transferred through crypto-mixing services.
The unexpected transfer of money from Alameda accounts only days after Sam Bankman Fried was granted bail aroused doubts, as Cointelegraph reported on December 28.
Nearly 24 hours later, it seems that the person responsible for these financial transfers carefully planned their transaction paths.
The initial flow of money started with numerous Alameda addresses exchanging tokens for Ether or Tether and transferring them to crypto mixers, according to data provided by the crypto forensic organization Arkham. These payments were mostly directed to two primary wallets with the prefixes 0xe5D and 0x971.
After sending tokens to an address beginning with 0x738, the Alameda wallet then transmitted tokens to an address beginning with 0x64e. The ETH is then divided up and sent to smaller wallets, often in amounts of $200,000 and $50,000, through this 0x64e wallet. It was then sent to mixers like Fixedfloat and ChangeNOW.
Stablecoins were purchased via a different wallet, where wallet assets were first converted to USDT and then transmitted to Fixedfloat. Mixers were used to exchange a total of 800,000 USDT, and another 400,000 USDT was funneled via different techniques. Stablecoins worth an extra 200,000 USDT were delivered through renBTC to the BTC network.
The following exchanges and transfers totaling $1.7 million were made using different mixing services:
- 270.5 ETH through ChangeNOW (~$325k)
- 800,000 USDT through Fixedfloat
- 200,000 USDT through Curve SynthSwap (to native BTC)
- 200,000 USDT through Airswap
- 200,000 USDT through other crypto-mixing services
The transfer of money from the Alameda wallet via mixing equipment caused quite a stir in the cryptocurrency world. Many people raise concerns about the timing of the financial transfers, while others focus on the use of mixing services and the incapacity of the authorities to stop it despite the fact that the case is still pending.