FTX Claims $415 Million Of Crypto Was Hacked

On Tuesday, bankrupt crypto exchange FTX claimed that cryptocurrencies worth $415 million had been stolen from the company’s accounts in a hack.

This is a substantial amount of the company’s assets that have been identified so far for the purpose of recovery.

The assets

Advisors and lawyers working for debtors of FTX put forward a presentation regarding the recoveries associated with the company.

According to the presentation, the value of the total liquid assets that have been identified for the purpose of recovery so far is around $5.5 billion.

But, this also includes $323 million worth of ‘third-party transfers’ from the international FTX.com that were unauthorized.

Likewise, there are also transfers worth $90 million that were made from FTX US. The company also stated that another $2 million worth of crypto had also been stolen from Alameda Research.

Back in November when FTX had first collapsed and filed for bankruptcy, the company’s system had been compromised and it is possible that the missing digital assets are connected to that incident.

According to Elliptic, the blockchain analytics company, the value of the crypto stolen in the said hack had been $477 million at the time.

The disaster

A wave of withdrawals from the crypto exchange and its sister trading firm Alameda Research had driven the company to file for bankruptcy in November 2022.

Federal prosecutors indicted the former CEO and founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, on charges of money laundering and fraud in December.

Earlier this month, the disgraced crypto entrepreneur had pleaded not guilty to the charges. His trial has been scheduled for October this year and he has been released on a bond of $250 million.

A share repurchase payment worth $2.1 billion made in the third quarter of 2021 to crypto exchange Binance is also under review by FTX advisors.

Binance was the first outside company to have invested in FTX, but its stake had been bought out by Bankman-Fried back in 2021.

Binance

Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, commonly known as CZ, was also questioned about the $2.1 billion payment as part of the bankruptcy proceedings of FTX.

Zhao was asked if he was ready to send the funds back and responded that the lawyers would deal with the matter.

He stated that the company’s legal team was quite capable of dealing with the scenario. The presentation that FTX’s advisors and lawyers have put forward is 20 pages long.

It provides a complete breakdown of the company’s assets, along with where they are so they could be recovered in order to pay back the debtors.

It also includes property worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried was living and running the company.

The acting CEO of FTX, John Ray, said that they were making progress in terms of recoveries and their team had uncovered this information after an immense about of effort and investigation.

While liquid and illiquid tokens were separated, there were still FTT tokens worth $529 million, which is the native token of the FTX exchange that has plunged 90% since the company’s collapse.