The FTX/Alameda saga continues to keep the crypto industry on its toes. Just before Christmas, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was released on a $250 million bail under house arrest, which his parents secured with the equity in their home.
A few hours ago, former Alameda Research wallets came to life, as noted by several on-chain analysts. Oddly enough, the transfers of altcoins come just shortly after Bankman-Fried was allowed to make himself comfortable in his parents’ home, equipped with an Internet connection.
Alameda Wallets Swaps Token For Bitcoin
As several on-chain analysts have revealed, it seems unlikely that the transfers are consolidating movements by new FTX CEO John Ray. Martin Lee, data journalist at Nansen stated that there has been a lot of activity on Alameda wallets “in the last 6-7 hours.”
Various Ethereum-based tokens have been consolidated into two main wallets. Among others, 3,263 CVX, equivalent to about $11,390 were sent from the Convex Finance: staking wrapper Abra to the Alameda Research wallet.
Another transfer was 74,112 CRV, equivalent to $39,152, sent from Alameda Research to a MetaMask wallet. A third transfer saw 45.6 ETH sent to an unknown wallet address, among other transactions.
In general, altcoins and Tether as well as USDC were exchanged for ETH. What makes the transfers so striking is that ETH was then sent to multiple wallets and finally to the FixedFloat and Changenow mixers. Lee explained that the order of the transfers is “really strange” and went on to say:
Consolidating assets makes sense but distributing it into fresh wallets before sending it to ChangeNow / FixedFloat seems like they’re tryna hide their tracks. Could have just transferred directly after consolidating.
OXT research, a firm dedicated to on-chain analysis further elaborated:
Alameda ETH addresses are digging around in the sofa for spare change and swapping bits ERC20s for ETH/USDT. ETH and USDT then funneled through instant exchangers. Rings some major alarm bells…
Yet, there is no final analysis of the total value of the transactions. However, Lee said, “Not sure what they were before they started moving but a lot of the transfers were small amounts, sub $60,000.”
The final target of the transactions was Bitcoin. As on-chain analyst ZachXBT revealed, four Bitcoin addresses can be attributed to the wire-puller behind the transactions. In total, these account for 11.9 BTC, about $198,000.
Who is responsible for the transactions – a hacker or really Bankman-Fried – seems to be unclear at the moment. However, as the crypto community noted, the timing, a few days after being released on bail, is more than weird.
At press time, the Bitcoin price stood at $16,648, experiencing a slight downtrend of -1.3% over the last 24 hours after being rejected at the $16,950 area.
