The hacker who took down the FTX exchange last week accumulated a considerable fortune, making them a whale in the Ether market (ETH).
According to Elliptic, a blockchain intelligence business, the struggling FTX exchange's wallets were emptied of more than $663 million in various crypto assets when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Elliptic calculated that $477 million of this was taken, and a sizable chunk of the tokens were eventually changed into ETH. Comparatively, it was thought that FTX had moved $186 million worth of more than a hundred different tokens to safe storage.
Four days later, according to a report from November 15, the attacker was still draining wallets—a practise known as "on-chain spoofing" by analysts.
Beosin, a blockchain security company, reports that the attacker has completed many swaps and cross-chain transactions over the previous day and possesses about $338 million in crypto assets as of November 15.
FTX Accounts Drainer (0x59AB…32b) has done many swaps and cross-chain activities in the previous day and currently possesses $338,598,702 worth of assets.
According to the wallet address, there are a staggering 228,523 ETH included, valued at around $288.8 million at the present market price.
This makes the “FTX Accounts Drainer” account the 35th largest holder of Ethereum based on the number of ETH held.
According to CoinCarp’s Ethereum rich list, the contract for Beacon Chain deposits holds approximately 15 million ETH. In addition, most of the top twenty are crypto exchanges, layer-2 protocols, or Decentralized Finance (DeFi) bridges.
The top 20 ETH wallets possess 27.7% of the total supply, while the top 50 wallets hold a third of all ETH.
The fact that the exploits occurred on both FTX and FTX.US has led many to believe that it may have been an inside job. Hugh Brooks, director of security operations at the analytics company Certik, alludes to on-chain evidence indicating this. It cannot be ruled out that someone insider with access to these wallets moved the funds unless the private keys were compromised, he said on November 15.
The prospective market-wide sale of Ether by its 35th-largest holder has not affected Ether prices.
According to CoinGecko, ETH was trading flat on the day at $1,260 at the time of writing. Since the FTX disaster began, the asset has lost approximately 23%.