During the FTX hack, consultant Kumanan Ramanathan used his personal Ledger Nano hardware wallet to protect vulnerable assets. Wired reports this.
On November 11, 2022, an unusual outflow of funds alarmed the company’s employees and executives. The firm estimates that the hacker withdrew more than $400 million in cryptocurrencies, but thanks to Ramanathan, the rest of the funds were secured.
According to the publication, LedgerX CEO Zach Dexter was one of the first to notice the hack and put together an emergency call for FTX management. According to eyewitnesses, the burglar withdrew funds right in front of the employees. However, the founder of the exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried, was not present at the meeting.
FTX CTO Gary Wang had a hard time getting anyone to take action to protect the funds because many didn’t trust him and believed the money was already gone.
“The fox is in the chicken coop, are you going to change the keys to the chicken coop?” my colleagues asked.
Dexter approached the BitGo custodian with a request to create cold wallets to move the remaining funds. Company representatives said they would do them within half an hour, but FTX employees decided that an interim solution was needed during this time.
Alvarez & Marsall, a consultant working with FTX, said that he had his Ledger Nano in the office. He suggested using a hardware wallet as temporary storage.
According to the publication, Wang transferred between $400 million and $500 million to Ramanathan’s address. This helped reduce further losses, exchange employees admitted in a conversation with reporters.
The assets were stored on Ramanathan’s device until BitGo prepared cold wallets. According to Wired, more than $1.1 billion was subsequently moved to new addresses.
Another $400 million was transferred to the Bahamas Securities Commission “for security purposes.”
Earlier, the administration of the on-chain data marketplace Arkham Intel Exchange announced a reward for the FTX hacker in the amount of 100,000 ARKM.
Let us recall that in October the technical director of the exchange admitted that the balance of the company’s insurance fund was based on a formula that included an arbitrary number and daily trading volume.
The media also reported that FTX allowed Alameda Research to have a negative balance sheet of $65 billion.
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