Just-In: Tether Starts Blacklisting USDT Of FTX Exploiter

In response to the sudden movement of funds out of FTX and FTX US wallets, Tether took a protective measure by blacklisting USDT related to the FTX wallet drainer. Almost $600 million in tokens were transferred out of wallets with stablecoins withdrawals swapped from Tether to DAI and other tokens swapped to Ethereum. On-chain sleuth ZachXBT asserts FTX employees confirmed that they don’t recognize transferred funds.

Tether Blacklists FTX Exploiter’s USDT

Stablecoin issuer Tether blacklisted $3.9 million USDT on Avalanche (AVAX) and $27.5 million USDT on Solana (SOL) of the FTX attacker, reported on-chain sleuth ZachXBT.

PeckShieldAlert in a tweet on November 12 also confirmed blacklisting USDT on AVAX related to FTX Accounts Drainer 0x59ab…32b. PeckShieldAlert also reported the movement of funds from multiple FTX wallets to 0x59AB…32b.

Moreover, many FTX users confirmed seeing $0 balances in their FTX.com and FTX US wallets. Crypto influencers expect the movement of funds as an insider job as an auto-update pushed to leak all private keys.

Foobar confirmed that somebody sent an on-chain message to the recipient account with 4byte selector “0x3d24a1ff”, which is the hash of the function name “Rug Pull All.” It confirmed the root access has been shared with someone rushing to liquidate funds.

On-chain data indicates that funds were transferred from FTX and sold through DEX. Currently, UNI, stETH, 1INCH, WBTC, SUSHI, YFI, and LDO with addresses starting with 0x59ab are sold. Other tokens including PAXG, LINK, MATIC, AAVE, SNX, SHIB, and APE are still held.

In addition, FTX has 166 million US dollars of funds transferred to the address starting with 0xd801, including SRM, MATIC, CHZ, DYDX, BAND, MANA, ENS, CEL, HT, GRT, GALA, CRV, and other tokens.

FTX US General Counsel Ryne Miller in a tweet said:

“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.”

Elon Musk Reacts To FTX Crisis

Elon Musk tracking the FTX crisis also recognized Twitter’s contribution in tracking developments related to FTX in real-time. He also confirmed completing work on eliminating bots and spam on Twitter.