...and is definitely not an enormous grift that's pouring lighter fluid on our already smoldering planet.
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This not entirely unlike someone trying to sell you a house that is "otherwise sturdy, but in an engulfed-in-flames crisis".
He says the project is intended to reduce the "cascading negative effects of FTX", underscoring how nervous this whole debacle is making other players in the industry.
He announced that they would continue trading their remaining assets, and continue operating their venture fund. However, he said the future of the hedge fund was unclear, and likely to depend on what happens with FTX customer withdrawals.
"I'm pretty disgusted with the space as a whole and kinda humanity in general," he continued. "I'm at a loss for words at the depth & breadth of the pieces of shit that permeate crypto. So many fucking sociopaths were granted the opportunity to do so much damage. It's hard for me to imagine the space bouncing back quickly from this ordeal. Too many got burned too hard."
Users have been hesitant to believe this explanation, given the enormous shakeup in the industry lately, and the tendency for firms to be less-than-forthcoming when they are in major crisis.
Three days prior, the company had published a blog post claiming that AAX had no exposure to FTX and its affiliated companies, that AAX had stable reserves, and that user funds were never exposed to counterparty risk.
This serves as a good example of how theft amounts shouldn't be naively calculated based on the token price before the theft × the number of tokens stolen. $FLARE was priced at around $18.25 before the attack, and a naive calculation would place the theft amount at $71 billion. However, the lack of liquidity caused the token price to plummet to $0.0000018, and the attacker ultimately ended up with around $17 million.
The total funds stolen appear to be around $4.17 million, according to analysis by SlowMist.
Several users replied to the message in shock that their data was exposed, saying they'd never done anything wrong. The Tokensoft employee replied, "If you made it on the naughty list...yes, shame on you....I shared your info, better luck next time".
The project later deleted the link from the Discord server, then tried to claim that it had never been posted at all, then issued a statement that "information was mistakenly posted in Tokensoft's social media channels".
This contradicted FTX's previous statement that "Per our Bahamian HQ's regulation and regulators, we have begun to facilitate withdrawals of Bahamian funds." The announcement that they would be processing withdrawals for Bahamian customers led to a slew of non-Bahamian customers trying to find ways to withdraw their funds via bribes and shady NFT deals.
Some have viewed FTX's choice to enable Bahamian withdrawals as evidence that they were trying to allow FTX employees and family members to get access to their funds on the exchange, even when most customers had no such access.
Crypto.com's CEO, Kris Marszalek, replied: "It was supposed to be a move to a new cold storage address, but was sent to a whitelisted external exchange address. We worked with Gate team and the funds were subsequently returned to our cold storage." He later clarified that all of the funds were returned.
Twitter users, reasonably, reacted in horror at the revelation that the platform had accidentally sent such a substantial portion of their funds elsewhere in a careless mistake, and that such a monumental mistake was even possible. They were lucky that they erroneously sent the funds to another exchange, and one who agreed to return the funds.
This is not the first time Crypto.com has erroneously transferred funds; in August of this year, they sued a woman to whom they'd accidentally sent $7.2 million that wasn't hers.
An FTX account administrator wrote on the FTX support Telegram, "FTX has been hacked. FTX apps are malware. Delete them. Chat is open. Don't go on FTX site as it might download Trojans". The message was pinned by FTX General Counsel Ryne Miller.
Miller later wrote on Twitter, "Investigating abnormalities with wallet movements related to consolidation of ftx balances across exchanges - unclear facts as other movements not clear. Will share more info as soon as we have it."
A Telegram admin subsequently wrote, "Not all hope is lost. Engineers have managed to retrieve substantial amount of funds," but no details were provided beyond that. A later announcement by Miller claimed that FTX had "initiated precautionary steps to move all digital assets to cold storage", suggesting some of the transfers may have been a part of that effort.
Many speculated that the so-called hack had been coordinated by insiders.
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