The new CEO of troubled cryptocurrency platform FTX.com on Saturday said the company was making “every effort to secure all assets” following unauthorized transactions potentially worth millions of US dollars.
“Unauthorized access to certain assets has occurred,” FTX CEO John Ray said in a statement posted to Twitter by the company’s general counsel, Ryne Miller.
FTX officials did not detail the quantity of unauthorized transactions made, but cryptocurrency analysis firm Elliptic Ltd said in a report published on Saturday that “US$477 million is suspected to have been stolen.”
Photo: AFP
More than “US$663 million in various tokens” had been drained from FTX’s wallets only 24 hours after it filed for bankruptcy,” Elliptic said, with the difference “believed to have been moved into secure storage by FTX themselves.”
FTX US and FTX.com “continue to make every effort to secure all assets, wherever located,” said Ray, who specializes in corporate turnarounds.
A debate formed on social media about whether the exchange was hacked or a company insider had stolen funds, a possibility that cryptocurrency analysts could not rule out.
The announcement comes a day after FTX filed for bankruptcy, part of a stunning collapse that has reverberated through the relatively young sector, sending other cryptocurrencies plummeting and drawing scrutiny from government regulators.
The company had valued its assets between US$10 billion and US$50 billion, and listed more than 130 affiliated companies around the world tied to FTX.com, FTX US and trading firm Alameda Research Ltd, according to its bankruptcy filing.
Additionally, 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried, once considered a star in the freewheeling cryptocurrency world, resigned on Friday as the platform’s CEO. He was interviewed by Bahamian police and regulators on Saturday, a person familiar with the matter said.
As recently as 10 days ago, FTX was considered the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency platform, at one point valued at US$32 billion, but the company is now left trying to reassure a skeptical public.
“We are in the process of removing trading and withdrawal functionality and moving as many digital assets as can be identified to a new cold wallet custodian,” Ray said in the statement.
“Cold storage” refers to moving cryptocurrency assets to a hardware “wallet” unconnected to the Internet to assure its security.
“An active fact review and mitigation exercise was initiated immediately in response” to the unauthorized transactions, Ray said.
Miller wrote on Twitter about an investigation into anomalies and other unclear movements, and by Saturday morning indicated that “unauthorized transactions” had occurred.
Politicians and regulators are calling for stricter oversight of the unwieldy industry. Experts say the saga is still unfolding.
“We’ll have to wait and see what the fallout is, but I think we are going to see more dominoes falling and an awful lot of people stand to lose their money and their savings,” said Frances Coppola, an independent financial and economic commentator. “That is just tragic, really.”
The timing and the extent of access that the assumed hacker appeared to achieve, siphoning money from multiple parts of the company, led Coppola and other analysts to theorize that it could have been an inside job.
The collapse of FTX highlights the need for cryptocurrency to be regulated more like traditional finance, Coppola said.
“Cyrpto isn’t in the very early stages anymore,” she said. “We’ve got ordinary people putting their life savings into it.”
Additional reporting by AP and Bloomberg
Intel Corp chief executive officer Lip-Bu Tan (陳立武) is expected to meet with Taiwanese suppliers next month in conjunction with the opening of the Computex Taipei trade show, supply chain sources said on Monday. The visit, the first for Tan to Taiwan since assuming his new post last month, would be aimed at enhancing Intel’s ties with suppliers in Taiwan as he attempts to help turn around the struggling US chipmaker, the sources said. Tan is to hold a banquet to celebrate Intel’s 40-year presence in Taiwan before Computex opens on May 20 and invite dozens of Taiwanese suppliers to exchange views
Application-specific integrated circuit designer Faraday Technology Corp (智原) yesterday said that although revenue this quarter would decline 30 percent from last quarter, it retained its full-year forecast of revenue growth of 100 percent. The company attributed the quarterly drop to a slowdown in customers’ production of chips using Faraday’s advanced packaging technology. The company is still confident about its revenue growth this year, given its strong “design-win” — or the projects it won to help customers design their chips, Faraday president Steve Wang (王國雍) told an online earnings conference. “The design-win this year is better than we expected. We believe we will win
Quanta Computer Inc (廣達) chairman Barry Lam (林百里) is expected to share his views about the artificial intelligence (AI) industry’s prospects during his speech at the company’s 37th anniversary ceremony, as AI servers have become a new growth engine for the equipment manufacturing service provider. Lam’s speech is much anticipated, as Quanta has risen as one of the world’s major AI server suppliers. The company reported a 30 percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue to NT$1.41 trillion (US$43.35 billion) last year, thanks to fast-growing demand for servers, especially those with AI capabilities. The company told investors in November last year that
Power supply and electronic components maker Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to ship its new 1 megawatt charging systems for electric trucks and buses in the first half of next year at the earliest. The new charging piles, which deliver up to 1 megawatt of charging power, are designed for heavy-duty electric vehicles, and support a maximum current of 1,500 amperes and output of 1,250 volts, Delta said in a news release. “If everything goes smoothly, we could begin shipping those new charging systems as early as in the first half of next year,” a company official said. The new
RSS