Key learning points
- Sam Bankman-Fried may have sent more than $1.48 million worth of crypto to various exchanges to cash out the money.
- One of his well-known wallets, along with numerous well-known Alameda wallets, consolidated funds together and then proceeded to wind down through three centralized exchanges, as well as Ren.
- It seems unlikely that law enforcement has control over these wallets.
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Sam Bankman-Fried insisted he only had $100,000 left in his bank account, but he never mentioned his wallet! The crypto villain may have paid out as much as $1.48 million.
Suspicious on-chain activity
Sam Bankman-Fried may have withdrawn a significant amount from his on-chain wallets – $1.48 million, according to Crypto Briefing’s calculation.
As noted by DeFi analyst BowTiedIguanachain data shows that on December 27, a wallet associated with Bankman-Fried sent 0.66 ETH to a newly created Ethereum wallet starting at 0x7386. We know that the original wallet belonged to SBF because he had tweeted it out September 2020.
The 0x7386 wallet received a total of 569.95 ETH from dozens of wallets in over a hundred transactions within five hours. Some of these wallets are tagged on Etherscan as belonging to Alameda Research.
Then from 519.95 ETH was sent to a wallet 0x64e9. This wallet is also newly created but already had 800,000 USDT before the ETH transaction. The previous 800,000 USDT was sent to four different addresses, which then merged the USDT into one wallet starting in 0x4e5b. According to Etherscan, that wallet belongs to the centralized exchange FixedFloat.
Meanwhile, 0x64e9 went on to trade most of his 519.95 ETH for USDT. 200,000 USDT was traded again for 10.33 renBTC. The funds were then bridged to Ren, who offers complete transaction privacy.
Another 200,000 USDT was sent to three different wallets and reconsolidated into a wallet starting with 0xbb3fdwhich Nansen flags as belonging to Binance.
Finally, the remaining 310.85 ETH was sent across eight different wallets and consolidated again, this time on a wallet that started in 0x077d, which Etherscan labels as belonging to crypto exchange ChangeNOW. The remaining 50 ETH from the original 0x7386 address were also sent to this wallet afterwards a short jump through a burner wallet.
Adding all of this up, it seems that whoever manages these wallets has paid out about $1,480,500 worth of cryptocurrencies.
Was it necessarily Bankman-Fried? No. Someone else could have discovered the private keys to these SBF-linked wallets, especially as bankruptcy filings seem to indicate that the FTX group was not particularly careful about security. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the money was moved at the behest of law enforcement, as the wallet activity indicates that the owner was aware of using relatively censorship-resistant methods to disburse money.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH, and several other crypto assets.