New York
CNN
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Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which filed for bankruptcy on Friday, is investigating whether crypto assets were stolen and taking all of its digital assets offline, the company said on Saturday. The assets could be worth more than $400 million, according to crypto risk management firm Elliptic.
in seconds Tweeted early Saturday, FTX general counsel Ryne Miller said the company “took precautions” and moved all of its digital assets to cold storage, meaning the crypto wallet is no longer connected to the internet. This comes after Friday’s announcement that the exchange has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Elliptic said that while the theft has not been confirmed, $473 million in crypto assets was apparently stolen from FTX.
This ‘Expedited’ process Friday night to ‘mitigate damage when unauthorized transactions are observed’ Miller said in a tweet.
Miller tweeted Friday night that FTX was “investigating anomalies in wallet movement related to the FTX integration.” Balance across exchanges. The facts remain unclear and the company will share more information soon, he added.
On decentralized exchanges, stablecoins and other missing tokens are rapidly converting to ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency after bitcoin, Ellipse said. Elliptic said this is a common technique used by hackers to prevent their funds from being seized.
Until last week, FTX, one of the strongest players in the crypto industry, was experiencing a rapid collapse. Its 30-year-old founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, has resigned and lost $16 billion of his fortune in less than a week.
In its bankruptcy filing, FTX said its estimated liabilities and assets were between $10 billion and $50 billion.
“I’m really sorry, again, here we are,” Bankman-Fried wrote in a post Friday twitter thread. “Hopefully things will find a way to recover.”
As scrutiny of cryptocurrency exchanges increases, Singapore-based crypto.com has admitted to accidentally sending more than $400 million in ether to the wrong account. Its CEO Kris Marszalek, say on twitter Instead of transferring 320,000 ETH to a corporate account on rival exchange Gate.io three weeks ago, it was transferred to one of its offline or “cold” wallets.
Although funds have been recovered, users are exiting the platform, fearing the same outcome as FTX.Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao warning “It’s a clear sign of a problem if exchanges have to transfer large amounts of cryptocurrency before or after they reveal their wallet addresses,” he said on Twitter.
“We have enhanced our processes and systems to better manage these internal transfers,” Marszalek tweet Sunday.