Tether Blacklists Mysterious FTX Wallets as Account Drainer Liquidates MATIC, LINK, AVAX Holdings

Over $3.9m tether on Avalanche and $27.5m tether on Solana linked to the FTX account drainer has been blacklisted by Tether.

By Shaurya Malwa

Nov 12, 2022 at 6:52 a.m. UTC

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Shaurya Malwa

Shaurya is an analyst/editor for CoinDesk's markets team in Asia.

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The entity behind mysterious fund movements related to FTX crypto wallets has started liquidating token holdings from various networks.

Over $12 million in chainlink (LINK) tokens were sold in early Asian hours across two transactions, shortly after reports of a hack at FTX. The entity gained just under $10 million after slippage – a term to describe losses taken by a market participant when receiving a different trade execution price than intended – implying the entity was rushing to liquidate funds.

Separately, activity tied to the account drainer’s wallets on the Polygon blockchain showed some 3 million MATIC tokens were sold for $2.4 million.

Stablecoin issuer Tether apparently blocked some funds tied to the account drainer’s wallets that sold tokens on Avalanche and Solana networks earlier this morning, pseudonymous blockchain sleuth ZachXBT pointed out on Twitter.

Over $3.9m tether (USDT) on Avalanche and $27.5m tether on Solana linked to the FTX account drainer has been blacklisted by Tether.

CoinDesk independently verified the code used by Tether to block such addresses and confirmed the blacklist.

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