In a tweet on Tuesday, Arkham Intelligence said that an Alameda-linked wallet “brokenfish.eth” withdrew US$2 million in FTT from BentoBox, a smart contract that acts as the central vault for decentralized finance protocol SushiSwap. SushiSwap is a decentralized exchange and automated market maker built on Ethereum, which former FTX Chief Executive Officer Sam Bankman-Fried temporarily took over in 2020.
The connection has triggered suspicion that Bankman-Fried may be involved in the transfers. John Ray III, the court-appointed CEO of FTX, is also suspected to be behind the transfers as part of bankruptcy proceedings. FTX’s restructuring team said the company has taken an active role to claw back funds linked to the bankrupt exchange and its subsidiaries.
The wallet, which has received several transactions from another Alameda Research address since its creation 31 days ago, now holds $183 million in various altcoins and $26 million in ether (ETH). The largest holding is $54 million worth of BitDAO tokens (BIT), although that token has significantly thin liquidity with 2% market depth of just $15,000 on Coinbase, according to CoinMarketCap. Market depth is a metric that assesses how much capital it would take to move an asset by a certain percentage.
Earlier this month it was reported that crypto exchange FTX, the sister company to Alameda Research, had recovered over $5 billion in assets following the collapse of both companies in November. Ray III has made it clear that he intends to seize control of the assets of FTX and its subsidiaries in order to pay off its debts. FTX announced in January that it discovered over $5.5 billion in liquid assets, with more than $3 billion owed to its top 50 creditors. This was not the first time that Alameda-linked wallets made significant transfers in February.
On Feb. 2, Blockchain security firm PeckShield reported the “Alameda Consolidation” address had received $13 million in crypto assets from three different wallets. One of these wallets belonged to the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex and transferred approximately $8.5 million in Tether
Lawyers representing FTX and Alameda’s restructuring team did not immediately respond to Forkast’s request for comment. Arkham added that another Alameda-linked Ethereum account woke up on Feb. 7 and received over US$600,000 worth of cryptocurrencies. The tokens were then sent to an FTX holding address, known to be used as safe storage by FTX’s bankruptcy team. Last week, blockchain security firm PeckShield Alert flagged that US$13 million worth of crypto assets had been transferred to a wallet believed to be linked to Alameda consolidation.
