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FTX Hit by Nine-Figure Hack as Meltdown Continues

Published 11/13/2022, 01:22 AM
Updated 05/08/2020, 11:50 AM

One of the biggest dramas in cryptocurrency history continues. Over $400 million was drained from the bankrupt crypto exchange early Saturday.

Key Takeaways

  • FTX has been hacked.
  • Over $400 million was drained from the cryptocurrency exchange early Saturday. Employees have moved remaining assets to cold storage.
  • Some have suggested that the incident may be an inside job due to the ongoing FTX meltdown.

FTX.US General Counsel Ryne Miller said that assets had been moved to cold storage “to mitigate damage upon observing unauthorized transactions.”

FTX Suffers Major Hack

FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange that’s been at the center of a rapidly developing drama this week, has been hacked.

Hours after the embattled firm announced it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, several on-chain sleuths took to Twitter to point out a series of suspicious outflows from the exchange to external wallets. Though the full scale of the damage is still unknown, over $400 million was moved to addresses on Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, and other crypto networks. “FTX has been hacked. All funds seem to be gone,” an admin going by Rey wrote on the exchange’s official Telegram channel. According to the admin, FTX’s app was also affected. “FTX apps are malware. Delete them,” they wrote.

FTX.US General Counsel Ryne Miller addressed the incident on Twitter early Saturday, saying that some of the company’s remaining employees were “investigating abnormalities with wallet movements.” He later followed up by confirming that team members had moved assets on FTX and FTX.US to cold storage “to mitigate damage upon observing unauthorized transactions.”

Tweet

Due to the nature of the hack, which saw the attackers gain free access to multiple areas of the exchange to drain hundreds of millions of dollars across different crypto networks, some have speculated that the incident may have been an inside job. On-chain detective ZachXBT tweeted.

“Multiple former FTX employees confirmed to me they do not recognize these transfers,”

Shortly after the hack, Tether froze $31.4 million worth of USDT transferred in the incident. Elon Musk also noted that the hack was “being tracked in real-time on Twitter.” Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who helped start a bank run on FTX last week by announcing his plans to dump a large allocation of FTX’s FTT coin, also posted a tweet that appeared to allude to the incident, taking the opportunity to take a shot at former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. “What a sh!t show… And it’s going to be crypto’s fault, (instead of one guy’s fault)…” he tweeted.

Tweet

The hack news follows a week of chaos in the crypto market brought on by FTX’s collapse. This week, it emerged that the exchange was insolvent after former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried used billions of dollars worth of customer funds to bail out his trading firm, Alamada Research. The firm filed for bankruptcy Friday while Bankman-Fried stepped down.

Alameda is also winding down. The FTX situation is still developing at a fast pace, and U.S. agencies like the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating the events.

This story is developing and will be updated as further details emerge.

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