Key Takeaways
- Sam Bankman-Fried may have sent more than $1.48 million worth of crypto to various exchanges to cash out.
- One of his widely known wallets, along with numerous well-known Alameda wallets, consolidated the funds and then proceeded to ramp them up through three centralized exchanges, as well as Ren.
- It seems unlikely that law enforcement will have control over these wallets.
Share this article
Sam Bankman-Fried insisted he only had $100,000 left in his bank account, but he never mentioned his wallet! The crypto villain may have cashed out as much as $1.48 million.
Suspicious activity in the chain
Sam Bankman-Fried may have cashed out a significant amount of money from his on-chain wallets: $1.48 million, according to Crypto Briefing’s calculations.
As noted by DeFi analyst BowTiedIguanadata in the chain 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 the original wallet belonged to SBF because he did tweeted it out in September 2020.
The 0x7386 wallet received a total of 569.95 ETH from dozens of wallets in over a hundred transactions within five hours. Some of these wallets are tagged on Etherscan as belonging to Alameda Research.
Then 519.95 ETH was sent to a wallet starting in 0x64e9. This wallet was also newly created, but already contained 800,000 USDT before the ETH transaction. The previous 800,000 USDT were sent to four different addresses, which then all consolidated the USDT into one wallet, starting in 0x4e5b. According to Etherscan, that wallet belongs to the centralized exchange FixedFloat.
Meanwhile, 0x64e9 proceeded to exchange most of its 519.95 ETH for USDT. 200,000 USDT was again exchanged for 10.33 renBTC. The funds were then bridged to Ren, which offers complete transaction privacy.
Another 200,000 USDT was sent to three different wallets and reconsolidated into one wallet, starting with 0xbb3fdwhich Nansen flags as belonging to Binance.
Finally, the remaining 310.85 ETH were sent to eight different wallets and consolidated again, this time to a wallet starting in 0x077dwhich is labeled by Etherscan as belonging to crypto exchange ChangeNOW. The remaining 50 ETH from the original 0x7386 address were then sent to this wallet as well a short jump through a burner wallet.
If you add it all up, it looks like whoever controls these wallets has cashed out around $1,480,500 worth of cryptocurrencies.
Was it necessarily Bankman-Fried? No. Someone else could have discovered the private keys to these SBF-linked wallets, especially since bankruptcy filings seem to indicate that the FTX group was not particularly careful about security. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the money was moved at the behest of law enforcement, as the wallet activity shows that the owner was aware of using relatively censorship-resistant methods to cash out.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other crypto assets.
Share this article
