FTX hacker dumps 50,000 ETH

After the hack, the FTX wallet drainer was the 27th largest ETH holder, but he dropped 10 positions after the weekend ETH dump.

Just hours after the crypto exchange filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 11, the FTX hacker drained nearly $447 million from multiple FTX global and FTX.US exchange wallets.

In addition, the exploiter was the 27th largest ETH whale, with the majority of the stolen funds in ETH.

The FTX wallet drainer 1 transferred 50,000 ETH to a new address, 0x866E, on November 20. The new wallet address then exchanged the ETH for renBTC (ERC-20 version of BTC) and bridged to two Bitcoin blockchain wallets.

One wallet, bc1qvd…gpedg, held 1,070 renBTC, while another, bc1qa…n0702, held 2,444 renBTC.

CertiK, a crypto analytic group, later tracked the bridged renBTC on the bc1qvd…gpedg address and discovered that the address used a money laundering technique known as peel chain to launder the renBTC.

A Peel chain is a method of laundering large amounts of cryptocurrency via a long series of minor transactions. In a low-value transfer, a small portion is ‘peeled’ from the subject’s address.

These incrementally laundered funds are frequently transferred to exchanges where they can be converted into fiat currency or other cryptocurrencies.