FTX

On November 11, 2022, at 21:22 UTC, FTX, a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, was hit by a massive hack amidst its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, with $477 million in cryptoassets stolen, including $434 million in stablecoins and tokens like 9500 ETH ($15.5 million), as reported by Elliptic and CoinDesk. The breach, likely exploiting unencrypted private keys stored insecurely by FTX, per Bloomberg, saw funds moved to addresses like 0x59abf3837fa962d6853b4cc0a19513aa031fd32b for ETH, per Elliptic. The hacker swapped $280 million via decentralized exchanges like Uniswap and PancakeSwap, bridged 65000 ETH ($74 million) to Bitcoin via RenBridge—owned by FTX’s sister company Alameda Research—and laundered 2849 BTC through ChipMixer, with $4 million cashed out at exchanges, per Elliptic.

By September 30, 2023, $120 million in dormant ETH was converted to BTC via THORSwap and mixed through Sinbad, suspected to be a Blender rebrand linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, per Elliptic. FTX, with $10 billion daily volume pre-collapse per CoinMarketCap, secured $300 million in assets and froze $31.5 million in USDT with Tether’s help, per Forbes. Twitter’s @zachxbt flagged suspicious transfers, while Reddit’s u/ChainSleuth speculated on insider involvement, though DOJ findings later ruled it out. No perpetrators were identified, but $94 million was lost to seizures and swap costs, per Elliptic. One of 255 crypto hacks in 2022 totaling $3.7 billion, per Chainalysis, the incident fueled demands for encrypted key storage, multi-signature wallets, and cross-chain transaction monitoring to secure centralized exchanges.