Anonymous hackers of now-defunct exchange FTX have been moving large amounts of assets stolen from the platform, with new news coming as the trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried begins. transaction occurred.
Blockchain analysis company Elliptic said that as many as 72,500 stolen assets in FTX have been awakened for the first time since the exchange was hacked in November 2022. report October 12th.
According to Elliptic, thieves have converted $120 million worth of ETH into Bitcoin (BTC) through the multi-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) THORSwap since September 30, 2023.
The first exchange transaction took place just days before the Bankman-Fried trial was to begin on October 3. At the time of the hack, the exchange amount was worth $87 million, accounting for 18% of the total stolen funds of $477 million.
The FTX hack employed similar money laundering techniques to those deployed in November 2022, when the hackers used the cross-chain bridge RenBridge to transfer 65,000 ETH ($100 million) to BTC.
“The 180,000 ETH that was not converted to Bitcoin via RenBridge remained dormant until the early hours of September 30, 2023, by which time it was worth $300 million,” Elliptic wrote in a new report.
Elliptic mentioned that the FTX hack lost $94 million in the days following the hack, as attackers rushed to launder money through decentralized exchanges, cross-chain bridges, and mixers.
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Elliptic notes that nearly a year after the hack, the identity of the FTX thieves remains unknown. The blockchain analytics firm raised three possibilities as to who might be behind the FTX theft: FTX insiders, North Korea’s Lazarus group, and Russia-linked criminal groups.
“Some FTX employees had access to the company’s crypto assets in order to move them for operational reasons. In the chaos of a company’s bankruptcy and closure, insider actors could have taken these assets,” Elliptic’s report reads.
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