U.Today - Blockchain sleuth PeckShield has published an X post, sharing that it had spotted another lump of cryptocurrency stolen from the battered just recently.
This time, the FTX hacker made a transaction that carried approximately 288.8 Bitcoin worth almost $10 million.
Here's how much crypto was stolen from FTX in total
The FTX crypto trading giant collapsed in the early days of November almost a year ago, and then the mysterious hacker exploited it, stealing around $500 million in cryptocurrencies. Then he exchanged nearly all of the stolen crypto into ETH, getting 180,000 Ethereum. These ETH coins were then withdrawn to 12 different addresses. At that moment, this amount of ETH was evaluated at nearly $200,000,000 in fiat.Immediately after that, the hacker became the largest holder of the second most popular cryptocurrency. Later that November, the exploiter shifted 50,000 ETH to another wallet and then converted them into Ren Bitcoin (RenBTC), an Ethereum-powered version of Bitcoin.
Attempts to swap stolen ETH this year
As reported by U.Today, in early October, the FTX exploiter to swap it into tBTC via ThorSwap DeFi platform. When this attempt was spotted, the platform opted to suspend operations and go into maintenance mode rather than allow the hacker to exchange the stolen funds.The cyber criminal then turned to another chain – Threshold Network – and cross-chained the ETH into the Bitcoin network. At that time, the hacker still owned around 110,000 ETH worth $180,000,000 at that time.
After ThorSwap got suspended, Bitcoin maximalist Max Keiser took this as a chance to bash DeFi as "heavy centralized," unlike BTC.
171,800 ETH sent to major U.S. exchanges
In another turn of events, crypto tracker Whale Alert published data showing that crypto traders have been actively selling large amounts of Ethereum. Earlier today, four more or less consecutive transactions, carrying 21,852 ETH and three transfers of 50,000 ETH each, were made to such leading U.S.-based crypto trading venues as Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) (one) and Kraken (the three chunks of 50,000 each).After showing remarkable growth of 18.14% within a week (between Oct. 20 and Oct. 26), Ethereum reached a local high of $1,848 (following the flagship crypto Bitcoin, which soared above the $34,000 level). That surge of Ethereum was followed by a meager 2.84% drop over the past week.
Still, the second largest cryptocurrency continues to maintain the $1,800 level at the time of this writing.