The exchange FTX, as we reported before, is in serious trouble now. What last month was one of the top crypto exchanges worldwide, is now officially filing for bankruptcy in the US. That includes almost all the companies under the wing of FTX Group, including FTX Trading and Alameda Research. Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), its founder and CEO, just stepped away from the last position, handing it now to John Ray.
In the previous days, it was known by the public that FTX faced a huge liquidity crunch. US authorities are investigating the case, suspecting misuse of the customers’ funds. The crypto exchange Binance first offered to acquire the brand to provide liquidity to its users, but, after due diligence, they revoked the accord.
According to Reuters, SBF also asked a billionaire rescue to big players like Justin Sun (TRON founder), the crypto exchange OKX, Tether Limited, and the hedge fund Third Point. It was to no avail, though, and, without more alternatives, FTX filed for bankruptcy. The assets of the company were seized by the Bahamian government (where its HQ is registered) and withdrawals are only allowed in that country to comply with local laws.
As a result, numerous other desperate FTX customers are recurring to Bahamian citizens to try to withdraw their money. To make this possible, they’re buying Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) from Bahamians at astronomical prices, likely to pay them some percentage in exchange for their blocked funds.
At the same time, the FTX team announced via Telegram that they suffered a $600 million hack after filing for bankruptcy. Their website and app are compromised, so, they insisted to their customers avoid them, considering them malware now. The FTX General Counsel Ryne Miller confirmed this on Twitter.
FTX and conspiracy theories?
Of course, such a hack was too coincidental with the situation. Therefore, internal doing has been suspected from the beginning. For starting, the hacker sent stolen TRX funds to the crypto exchange Kraken, which was a beginner mistake. Kraken, like most regulated exchanges, identify all their users, so, they seem to have now the hacker’s identity —as the Kraken CTO confirmed.
In addition, for some reason, the hacker also created a new ERC-20 token dubbed “FTX sucks” and sent it to public wallets like Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum founder) and the donation addressAn address is a blockchain equivalent to a bank account number in the traditional financial system, or an email address.... More for Ukraine. It’s also available for sale on Uniswap. Not to mention that the same hacker walletA crypto wallet is a user-friendly software or hardware used to manage private keys. There are software wallets for desktop... is trading with an Ethereum Name Service (ENS) address called “fuckalamedaresearch.eth”.
Given all this data, some members and influencers in the crypto space believe that this attack is nothing more than a ruse from FTX itself to delete evidence. Meanwhile, SBF seems to have fled to Argentina, and the chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, is being accused to connive with FTX to secure them a regulatory monopoly.
Some reports assure the entire FTX’s legal team resigned, the exchange it’s missing $1 billion of client funds, and Alameda Research alone has around 100,000 creditors. To sources reached by Reuters, SBF even had a “backdoor” on the FTX platform that allowed him to move billionaire amounts without alerting anyone.
From the crypto users’ side, Bitcoin (BTCAn abbreviation for Bitcoin.) and other coins are been massively withdrawn to non-custodial wallets. This way, the users can have full control of their funds and only send them for trading, as it happens on Alfacash. Maybe because of it, BTC recovered from a low of $15,800 to almost $17,000 now.
Wanna trade BTC, ETH, USDT, and other tokens? You can do it safely on Alfacash! And don’t forget we’re talking about this and many other things on our social media.
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