The collapse of FTX was already too much to handle but a hacker did take advantage of the situation. The clever culprit went on to drain millions of assets from the exchange.
The hacker in question did not stop there, but instead started converting millions of ETH into RenBTC tokens.
The concerned wallet, “FTX Accounts Drainer,” initially started swapping decentralized stablecoin DAI for ETH. On November 20 and 21, the hacker surprisingly started swapping ETH worth millions for RenBTC tokens.
It’s surprising because Sam Bankman-Fried-owned crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, announced it is backing Ren (an Ethereum-based DeFi protocol) for a project.
The available funds for the project, totalling to about $160,000, are only enough to complete development through the end of the fourth quarter, per the Ren team. It is now seeking more funding post-FTX and Alameda collapse.
The hacker converted 65K ETH for 4,541 renBTC, and then cross-chained to the BTC network via Ren Protocol. All these conversions have been done in batches.
According to an Elliptic report, RenBridge has been used to launder at least $540 million in crypto assets since 2020.
The “FTX Accounts Drainer” wallet currently holds around 5,735.32 ETH.
On November 21, security firm PeckShield reported that the FTX Accounts Drainer wallet moved 180K ETH (totalling to around $199M). These were moved to 12 different (new) addresses, with each one holding 15K ETH.
Alerting on the issue, PeckShield Inc. tweeted:
#PeckShieldAlert FTX Accounts Drainer just moved 180k $ETH (~$199M) to 12 different (new) addresses (/ each holding 15K $ETH). https://t.co/enVusDqMLx pic.twitter.com/XvtGpLCAYm
— PeckShield Inc. (@peckshield) November 21, 2022
When the FTX breach occurred, no one in the community even knew what had actually happened behind the scenes of the crash.
Since a majority of the FTX leaders were shown to be frauds, many even assume that everything is an insider job. No one can even dispute that.
Had the hacker decided to cash-out the stolen assets, it would result in a dangerous situation (since the collapse of FTX), and its after-effects are just commencing.
The hacker’s constant ETH swapping did affect the value of the second-biggest cryptocurrency. ETH took a hit, trading at a price of $1,189.17 at the time of writing.
