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

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.

#PeckShieldAlert A PeckShield community contributor has detected that the address 0x59ab...32b labeled as FTX Accounts Drainer has swapped 1,000,000 $Link (~$6.4M) for 4,139 $ETH ($5.15M), -$1M pic.twitter.com/uKg4BfySYa

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) November 12, 2022

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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