The price of ether declined as much as 7% Monday as the allegedly FTX hacker dumped millions of dollars worth of stolen ethereum and swapped it for bitcoin.
A week ago, the hacker had pilfered roughly $288 million of ether after raiding Sam Bankman-Fried’s ailing crypto exchange, making the heist mastermind the 35th-largest ether holder globally, according to Bloomberg.
Blockchain analytics company Elliptic estimated that, in total, FTX had about $477 million swiped amid its dramatic donwfall.
However, the hacker’s ethereum holdings sunk 26% over the weekend, according to data from Etherscan cited by Decrypt.
Elliptic’s cofounder, Tom Robinson, told CNBC Monday that hackers were converting the ether into bitcoin using a blockchain bridge product called RenBTC.
According to the report, roughly $74 million has been moved to bitcoin from RenBTC.
Notably, Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading firm and a sister company to FTX, acquired RenBridge last year, which owns the RenBTC tool.
