The company’s general counsel Ryne Miller said Saturday that FTX was “investigating anomalies with wallet movements related to the consolidation of FTX balances across all exchanges.” Elliptic, a blockchain forensics firm, said there were initial indications that $473 million in cryptocurrency had been stolen from FTX late Friday night. The announcements fueled fears that FTX had been hacked as staff scrambled to secure billions in digital tokens that will eventually be used to repay creditors in bankruptcy proceedings at the cryptocurrency group, which was just recently valued at $32 billion. Tether, one of the main operators of cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar, said it stepped in to freeze $31.4 million of the tokens, which it suspected were being moved by an FTX hacker. A token theft could deepen the losses faced by customers and creditors of FTX, which until this week was one of the largest digital asset exchanges but filed for bankruptcy in the US on Friday after it was unable to meet a wave of customer withdrawals. “Following the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings, FTX US and FTX.com have initiated proactive measures to transfer all digital assets to [offline] Save. The process was accelerated this [Friday] evening — to mitigate the damage of observing unauthorized trades,” Miller said in tweets later shared by the main FTX account. Miller declined to comment further. Concerns about a potential hack were raised when an administrator on Telegram’s FTX support team said, “FTX has been hacked,” and warned users to stay away from FTX’s website and apps. FTX was widely used not only by do-it-yourself investors, but also by hedge funds and other sophisticated digital asset players. Galois Capital, a hedge fund whose founder is credited with spotting the collapse of cryptocurrency luna earlier this year, told investors this week that nearly half of its assets were locked up in FTX. Genesis, a well-known crypto trading company, has about $175 million locked up in FTX’s account, the company said. Bankman-Fried stepped down as CEO of FTX on Friday after he put the exchange, along with his Alameda trading company and 130 related entities, into Chapter 11 proceedings in Delaware. The 30-year-old businessman, once one of the most respected figures in digital assets with close ties to Washington lawmakers, will be replaced by John J Ray, a restructuring specialist who oversaw the bankruptcies of Enron and Nortel Networks. Ray said on Friday that FTX Group “has valuable assets that can only be effectively managed in an organized, joint process.” A loss of assets owed to creditors would mean an early setback for the team overseeing the sprawling insolvency, which will include at least $50 billion in assets and liabilities and 100,000 creditors, according to the filings. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating FTX, including the platform’s cryptocurrency lending products and its handling of client funds, according to a person familiar with the matter.
