Address Behind FTX Withdrawals Moves Over $200 Million in Ethereum

An unknown actor behind the suspicious withdrawals from the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, transferred Ethereum worth more than $200 million to 12 different wallets.

The transactions began on 21 November at about 18:00 Kyiv time. Over six minutes the so-called FTX Drainer carried out 12 withdrawals of 15,000 ETH to various wallets. After this, the funds did not move.

According to Avi Felman, head of digital asset trading at GoldenTree Asset Management, the attacker could be preparing to sell the assets.

However, The Block’s VP of research Larry Chermak believes that liquidating the withdrawn assets will not be easy.

“There is almost no liquidity for swapping Ether for renBTC. Moreover, such a transaction would incur about 70% price slippage,” he said.

In addition, the bridge used to send renBTC to the Bitcoin network is currently disabled. Exchanging on Ethereum for stablecoins, in turn, would lead to immediate asset freezes by law enforcement.

Recent transactions dropped the FTX Drainer’s wallet in the ranking of large ETH holders — now it sits in 36th place.

As a reminder, in the morning of November 12 an unknown moved more than $400 million from FTX accounts to external addresses. Some of the funds were blocked by Tether.

Subsequently, FTX Drainer performed a series of swaps on Ethereum. A further 50,000 ETH he transferred to renBTC and connected the assets to a cross-chain bridge for transfer to the mainnet.

Kraken’s head of security Nick Percoco wrote that the team knows the user’s identity, but publicly it has not disclosed it.

For more on the collapse of FTX and its impact on the crypto industry read ForkLog’s special report.

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