More than $600 million in cryptocurrency vanished from the wallets of the defunct cryptocurrency corporation FTX, with no obvious reason given.
Soon after, FTX announced that it had been hacked in its official Telegram channel and advised users not to install any new updates and to delete all FTX apps, it had been compromised.
“FTX apps include viruses. Take them out. The chat window is open. Don’t visit the FTX website since it could download Trojans,” a chat administrator in the FTX Support channel said.
Various Ethereum tokens, as well as the Solana and Binance Smart Chain tokens, have left FTX’s official wallets and transferred to decentralized exchanges like 1inch, according to on-chain statistics. It appears that both FTX and FTX US are impacted.
FTX General Counsel, Ryne Miller tweeted that he was “investigating irregularities with wallet movements connected to aggregation of ftx balances across exchanges.”
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The transfers occur on the same day that FTX formally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after losing allegedly billions of dollars in user payments. The transfers have not been officially acknowledged by FTX leadership.
The FTX US and FTX.com wallets have also been reported to have $0 balances by several wallet owners. The FTX API may be unavailable in this case.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was the target of filthy jokes and insults that were included in some of the transactions.
Cryptocurrency community members speculated on Twitter that the funds had been siphoned off in an attack.
Others thought that a member of Bankman-inner Fried’s circle might be in charge of organizing the outflows.
The market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies dropped to $841 billion, a decrease of $201 billion in just seven days.
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The risk for industry contagion is at an all-time high, and the FTX Bankruptcy action also concerns 130 organizations with whom the company was associated.
Without a doubt, the prior week was the most challenging, surprising, and devastating in a very long time. One of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, FTX, filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy with the US after refusing to allow customer withdrawals and citing a multi-billion liquidity hole.
Millions of customers have been denied access to their bitcoin holdings by the exchange, and it is still unclear whether or when they will be able to get any of it back.
Many participants are in disbelief, forecasting more difficult times as contagion will start spreading in terms of valuation and terms of regulation. This is a significant blow to the industry’s integrity.
(Nairametrics)
