Cryptospace Spotlight #47 (20 Nov 2022) - FTX hacker is one of the largest ETH holders
FTX hacker hold on to ~230K of ETH after swapping the tokens drained from FTX, Partior grew after one year and looks to become SWIFT alternative, BoA took aim at crypto exchange proof-of-reserves!
Security and Risk
16 Nov - FTX hacker is now one of the largest ETH holders
The FTX hacker now hold a total of 228,523 ETH worth $284.82 million. During the attack, the hacker stole $400 million from FTX wallets. The attacker swapped the stolen funds using numerous decentralized exchanges (DEX). These DEX include CowSwap, UniSwap, and 1inch. However, forensic research from Arkham discovered that the hacker lost a massive amount of the stolen funds while attempting to move them through different chains. The attacker tried to conceal these traces by transferring the assets to other chains. [more]
But Tom Robinson, chief scientist at Elliptic, isn’t totally convinced the incident was a hack. In an email to Blockworks, Robinson explained that based on the information shared publicly it’s still not clear exactly what happened. But his interpretation would be that the Bahamian regulator gave instructions to convert the stablecoins and other tokens into ETH and DAI to avoid them being frozen by their issuers. [more]
Other Crypto Picks
United States - Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Durbin wrote to the former and current CEOs of FTX — Sam Bankman-Fried and John Jay Ray III, respectively — on Nov. 16 to ask for more information on the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange. [more]
Russia - Russian bill would legalize crypto mining, sales under ‘experimental legal regime. [more]
The proposed law reads, “Digital currency obtained as a result of mining can be disposed of by the person who carried out the mining of this digital currency on the condition that Russian information infrastructure is not used in conducting transactions with it, with the exception of cases of transactions carried out in accordance with the established experimental legal regime”.
Australia - Australian financial authorities will start talks with the cryptocurrency industry and aim to introduce rules for regulating exchanges next year after one of the world’s biggest crypto trading platforms, FTX.com, collapsed last week, according to a report in the Australian Financial Review. [more]
Bank of America said that crypto exchanges' proof of reserves have too many shortcomings. Among the shortcomings, assets are shown at a fixed point in time, which gives opportunities for manipulation, such as borrowing assets right before the snapshot is taken. The cryptocurrency industry also needs a clear delineation between trading platforms and market makers. [more]
Stablecoin issuer Tether today announced a $1 billion chain swap to convert USDT it had on the Solana blockchain to the Ethereum blockchain. [more]
Crypto-lender Genesis announced to clients that it would pause withdrawals from its lending arm, citing "unprecedented market turmoil" due to the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX. [more]
Matter Labs, developers of Ethereum layer-2 zkSync, announced a $200 million Series C, Wednesday, co-led by Blockchain Capital and Dragonfly, with participation from LightSpeed Venture Partners, Variant, plus Andreessen Horowitz and other prior venture partners. [more]
One year on, Partior started with one settlement bank per currency, but that’s now evolved to multiple settlement banks. And it’s currently onboarding GBP, EUR, AUD, JPY, CNH and HKD. It looks like a nimbler, more open and interoperable SWIFT. [more]
Partior CEO indicated that Partior could support both commercial bank money (M1) and central bank money (M0).
He compares the payment sector with electric vehicles (EV). “The way that the power unit in cars changed disrupted everything, from supply chain through servicing. Even down to the methodology of selling the car,” he said. “The minute you changed the fuel in the pipe, you changed everything.”
Likewise, today, the “fuel” is digital currency.
Energy Web Foundation and its cofounder RMI are building a blockchain-based SAFc registry for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) certificates. The goal is to increase transparency and promote the use of more sustainable fuels. The work is part of a project for the Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance (SABA), founded by numerous big names: Bank of America, Boston Consulting Group, Boeing, Deloitte, Meta, JP Morgan, McKinsey & Co, Microsoft, Netflix and Salesforce. [more]