comment would be better without the conjecture at the end
How common is the knowledge of these best practices?
This looks like someone who barely understands crypto because all of the transfers can be traced, and since they're apparently working manually and slowly, the audit-surface is huge.
If you think about it, even his name seems to be a troll.
Another option is honestly an insider who got screwed (a lot of employees had a TONNE of money on FTX) selling the keys they knew of to someone else.
Nobody will ever not be suspicious of SBF and his inner circle again after this hack.
If it were just a big collapse and it went like an ordinary bankruptcy with the creditors getting a haircut, he'd just be considered an idiot. Money mysteriously vanished? Now he's malicious as well, and any court is going to ask SBF where it went, and even if he didn't know nobody would believe it.
2) trust me when I say, no one in crypto except some very very select exchanges actually know how to make a market trading software. They think they can compete with NYSE which is large and employs such incredible talent that it still survives in a really tough industry. They’re likely closer to my grad school project, which even I can tell you, sucked absolute balls.
I haven't seen any public information that tells us who it might be, this is all guess work, but it really doesn't look like a professional operation like Lazarus Group
2. Even if you ARE a skilled insider, you may have no experience with laundering coin.
3. The biggest/best coin launderer was killed (tornado?) recently, so you may have to learn everything again.
4. You may be an expert with a gun to your head in some basement in God knows where, and trying to not be shot.
It’s unclear if that’s a legit source though.
Mostly posting it for later, in case it turns out to be true.
There was also a tweet trying to pin it on a specific coworker.
Even if Circle did freeze some of DAI's USDC, the Dai contract does not contain the ability to freeze user funds, and I believe is also not upgradeable
For sake of lucidity, I want to say that this doesn't necessarily make DeFi integral to these hacks, but it does make the process of liquidating from these hacks easier.
Yes sorry I didn't articulate that very well in my post. This is what in fact I was asking - why it was significant in the "process of liquidating from these hacks."
Could you explain what you mean by "they don't "give up the ownerships of their crypto"? This sounds like an important point but I'm unsure what you mean. Do they anonymize the transaction or something else?
The first address used is 0x0d043128146654c7683fbf30ac98d7b2285ded00
It's a bit harder to trace using public tools because they immediately start splitting off the various coins to other addresses, but looking at just the USDC:
They split it off into a single purpose address that is just responsible for converting it to ETH. They do this via private transactions utilizing uniswap v3 and a set amount just about every minute (they settled on ~2M). If you scan through them their slippage is very good here. If you wait a bit of time you let the arbitrage bots move funds from wherever is available so your slippage isn't so bad.
account responsible for USDC conversion: https://debank.com/profile/0x58f4baccb411acef70a5f6dd174af78...
This account was also responsible for a number of liquidations: https://debank.com/profile/0x9e91ae672e7f7330fc6b9bab9c259bd...
They again show good slippage and also show that they use 3 different exchanges
After they've converted everything to ETH with good slippage they then fan out to multiple accounts that then do a series of deposits into tornado cash at 100 ETH each.
They were done with the liquidation within 2 hours. This attacker is still liquidating as far as I can tell
Say I want to sell 100 pokemons as fast as possible. I will take whatever the market wants to pay me. This is a market order.
Before my order goes in, people are willing to buy 10 pokemons at $50 and willing to buy 10 at $52. The midpoint is 51.
I put in my order.
10 of my pokemons get sold at $50. My slippage is $1x10.
The next level down is $48 where people are willing to buy 25 pokemons. So I will get filled now at $48. My slippage is $3x25=($51-48)x25.
Etc
https://etherscan.io/address/0x59abf3837fa962d6853b4cc0a1951...
[Edit: and also the Heist label is very useful!]
Of course one would assume he or his conspirators would do a better job, but maybe not if this busting out was initiated under time pressure.
Once again almost everything in cryptocurrency proves to be a scam.
This is like saying "once again almost everything in US dollars proves to be a scam" after Lehman fell.
The sentence makes no sense at all to me.
Once again people on HN hate on cryptocurrencies for no good reason.
This isn't a cryptocurrency problem, it's a fractional reserve banking problem. These centralized exchanges are unregulated banks in disguise. It's no surprise to anyone that they exhibit all of the problems of unregulated banks. Problems such as "we used customer deposits to gamble, lost everything and are now insolvent".
To think one of the reasons cryptocurrency was invented was to end the need for such things...
Traditional bankers have spent an incredible amount of time and taken huge political risks to gain hold over the US money supply. They and people in the wall street sphere have a very good reason to hate on crypto, they just dont have any convincing arguments for people like us who dont want them controlling the money supply.
Somehow Satoshi and Andreessen managed to not start a ponzi scheme and this guy did.
Still waiting for your argument on why the big 7 wall street banks should be involved in the money supply instead of democratically elected leaders, which was my primary point.
Are you replying to the right post? I don't see any mention of that
That could only work before 1997.[1]
[1] https://www.congress.gov/treaty-document/105th-congress/18/d...
The ETH will probably eventually be laundered and some of the cleaned coins sent places they could eventually be traded for XMR and eventually cashed out, but there's no way to do that quickly, and this needs to be done quickly.
I wonder if we will reach a point where "crypto" will revert to not meaning "cryptocurrency" though.
Blockchain based cryptocurrency isn't going anywhere anytime soon. This will remind people to take self custody of their crypto and not leave it on an exchange.
If anything, Crypto is easier to track and stop the looting, compared to if someone left a key to a warehouse containing a billion dollars in cash in it with no security cameras, which is what FTX seems to have managed to do.
From my observation, the overwhelming majority of failures, collapses, and hacks have had a fairly limited exposure to the Ethereum-style/Solidity-based networks. This even includes the exchange collapses like FTX.
By and large Monero, Litecoin, Bitcoin, Algorand, Cardano, and the other networks that are reasonably isolated from the ETH/Solidity space have been largely unaffected by the majority of the "cataclysm" that the space has seen over the last year or two. I don't see any of these projects closing up shop in the near future and I don't see their communities giving up on them either (maybe with the exception of Bitcoin's refusal to move away from PoW or to introduce more programmability).
Odds are the cryptocurrency space is going to recede for at least a few years once the ash settles but IMHO there are too many projects that have yet to suffer serious thefts (as in actual loss not numbers go up/down) in their communities. Likewise these projects tend to also be the ones with shops that are holding sufficient operating funds in stable assets (i.e. US dollar equivalents & bonds) to continue development for the next 5+ years.
TLDR: The failures, hacks, collapses, etc have had limited effect on a lot of projects outside of the popular/flashy part of the the cryptocurrency space. Those projects still have a more or less assured lease on life for the next half a decade.
There would have to be enough of them doing this to prevent the transactions from getting through, which is far from guaranteed, but this is of the sort of scale that it could gain the required support.
This may be an understatement of their skill level. It seems the individual(s) also used a Kraken account to transfer funds and have been identified per their CSO.
https://twitter.com/c7five/status/1591434844760076290?s=61&t...
We're not seeing any else, e.g. laundering through another exchange, splitting into different accounts, automating the liquidation of tokens to ETH, off loading ETH into a cold wallet etc.
The on chain activity makes this look like an individual who did not prepare extensively before doing this or doesn't have the skills to use automation/operational best practices