key takeaways
- Sam Bankman-Fried may have sent more than $1.48 million worth of cryptocurrency to various exchanges to withdraw the funds.
- One of his publicly known wallets, along with numerous known Alameda wallets, consolidated funds together and then proceeded to distribute them through three centralized exchanges, as well as to Ren.
- It seems unlikely that law enforcement will be in control of these wallets.
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Sam Bankman-Fried insisted that he only had $100,000 left in his bank account, but he never mentioned their wallets! The crypto villain may have cashed in as much as $1.48 million.
Suspicious chain activity
Sam Bankman-Fried may have cashed in a significant sum from his on-chain wallets: $1.48 million, according to Crypto Briefing’s calculation.
as pointed out DeFi Analyst BowTiedIguanastring data shows that on December 27 a wallet associated with Bankman-Fried sent 0.66 ETH to a newly created Ethereum wallet starting at 0x7386. We know that the original wallet belonged to SBF because he had he tweeted it in September 2020.
The wallet 0x7386 He received a total of 569.95 ETH from dozens of wallets in more than one hundred transactions in the space of five hours. Some of these wallets are tagged on Etherscan as belonging to Alameda Research.
He then proceeded to send 519.95 ETH to a wallet starting at 0x64e9. This wallet was also created recently, but I already had 800,000 USDT before the ETH transaction. The above 800,000 USDT was sent to four different addresses, all of which then consolidated the USDT into a wallet as of 0x4e5b. According to Etherscan, that wallet belongs to the centralized exchange FixedFloat.
Meanwhile, 0x64e9 proceeded to exchange most of his 519.95 ETH for USDT. 200,000 USDT was exchanged again for 10.33 renBTC. The funds were then bridged to Ren, which provides complete privacy in transactions.
Another 200,000 USDT was sent to three different wallets and consolidated once again into a wallet starting with 0xbb3fdwhat nansen flags as belonging to Binance.
Finally, the remaining 310.85 ETH was sent through eight different wallets and consolidated once again, this time in a wallet that started in 0x077d, which Etherscan labels as belonging to the ChangeNOW cryptocurrency exchange. The remaining 50 ETH from the original address 0x7386 was also sent to this wallet, after a short jump through a burning wallet.
Adding it all up, it looks like whoever controls these wallets cashed out roughly $1,480,500 worth of cryptocurrency.
Was it necessarily Bankman-Fried? No. Someone else could have discovered the private keys of these SBF-linked wallets, especially since the bankruptcy filings seem to indicate that the FTX group was not particularly careful about security. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the funds were moved at the behest of law enforcement, as the wallet’s activity indicates that the owner was aware of using relatively censorship-resistant methods to collect.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this article owned BTC, ETH, and various other crypto assets.
