ETH Tanks 8% Overnight As FTX Hacker Sells Ethereum Holdings

The world’s second-largest cryptocurrency is under strong selling pressure on Sunday evening. As of press time, Ethereum (ETH) is trading 8.09% down at a price of $1,120 and a market cap of $137 billion.

On Sunday, November 20, reports emerged that the FTX hacker who stole $600 million from the exchange is converting his ETH stash to Bitcoin. Last week, the hacker converted all the stablecoins to Ethereum accumulating $288 million worth of ETH. Citing data from Etherscan, crypto journalist Colin Wu reported:

The FTX hacker address (0x59…d32b) is converting a large amount of ETH into BTC. Today, about 30,000 ETH has been exchanged into RenBTC, and 1070 BTC has been transferred to the BTC network.

Administrators are still evaluating the wreckage caused by FTX’s bankruptcy. The crypto firm owes a staggering $3.1 billion to some of the top creditors. Besides, there are growing concerns that more digital outfits could topple amid the recent crisis.

Last week, reports emerged that crypto lender BlockFi is preparing for a potential bankruptcy. Speaking to Bloomberg TV, Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab, said:

“The FTX issues are really an urgent reminder of the need for regulatory clarity and a real regulatory framework for crypto”. The hype and speculation over the minting and trading of tokens “has generated a massive distraction from building actual products and services that reach consumers, solve actual problems.”

Ethereum Underperforms Bitcoin

Today’s ETH price correction is also the result of a broader market correction. The broader cryptocurrency market is down by 5.6% slipping under $800 billion as of press time. While ETH is down 8%, Bitcoin has also corrected over 4% slipping under $16,000.

Over the past couple of weeks, Ethereum has been severely underperforming Bitcoin. Several analysts believe that the recent market sell-off could pull the ETH price to under $1,000.

Along with Ethereum, all of the top ten altcoins have corrected between 5-10%.