The hacker who took advantage of the now-defunct FTX exchange last week amassed a sizeable fortune, elevating them to the title of “Ethereum whale.”
According to blockchain intelligence firm Elliptic, the troubled FTX exchange’s accounts were raided for more than $663 million in various crypto assets just one day after it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Elliptic estimated that $477 million of this was stolen, with a significant portion of those tokens being converted into ETH, and that FTX itself put $186 million worth of more than a hundred distinct tokens into secure storage.
In what researchers referred to as “on-chain spoofing,” the attacker was still draining wallets on November 15 four days later.
Beosin, a blockchain security company, reports that as of Nov. 15, the attacker held almost $338 million in cryptocurrency after carrying out several swaps and cross-chain transactions throughout the previous day.
FTX Accounts Drainer (0x59AB…32b) has conducted multiple swap and cross-chain operations for the past day and currently holds ~$338,598,702 of assets.
The majority of the funds are held in the
0x59ABf3837Fa962d6853b4Cc0a19513AA031fd32b address.Current balance: pic.twitter.com/SMrkbcwULL
— Beosin Alert (@BeosinAlert) November 15, 2022
According to the wallet address, there are a massive 228,523 ETH included, which, at the current market price, would be worth almost $288.8 million.
According to the amount of ETH possessed, this places the account known as the “FTX Accounts Drainer” as the 35th largest Ethereum holder.
The Beacon Chain deposit contract, which holds almost 15 million ETH, is the largest holder of Ethereum, according to CoinCarp’s rich list. Additionally, the majority of the top 20 are Decentralized Finance (DeFi) bridges, layer-2 protocols, and cryptocurrency exchanges.
27.7% of the total circulating supply of ETH is held by the top 20 ETH wallets, and a third is held by the top 50 wallets.
Both FTX and FTX US were the targets of the exploits, which led many people to believe that it might have been an inside job.
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