FTX Group Hack

TOTAL LOST $1.0B
Critical #14 All-Time Other

Summarize with AI

ChatGPT Perplexity Claude Grok
Affected Chain 2022 Incident surface
Recovered - No recovery reported
All-Time Rank #14 By amount stolen
Protocol Type Exit Scam/Other Target category

Incident Overview

Quick Summary

FTX crypto exchange, Alameda Research trading company, and 130 other affiliated companies declared bankruptcy. Lost funds are valued at an estimated 1,000,000,000 to 2,000,000,000 $USD.

Details of the Exploit

Sam Bankman-Fried announced the bankruptcy of his two companies: FTX and Alameda Research. The accident begins with the research revealing Alameda Research's collateral was dominated by FTX's native token $FTT. For being concrete about the collateral, Alameda had 14,600,000,000 $USD worth of assets in total, where 3,660,000,000 $USD was free $FTT tokens, and 2,160,000,000 $USD in "FTT collateral". There were also major amounts of $SOL and $SRM tokens. Mr. Bankman-Fried was an early investor in the Solana chain and the co-founder of the Serum exchange.

It sparked a run on FTX, with panicked customers withdrawing billions of dollars from the exchange. $FTT token crashed by more than 95% in 24 hours. $SOL was also affected by the accident and by the recent on-chain activity that 49,000,000 $SOL tokens were withdrawn from the staking which caused the token price to drop by approximately 60%. FTX halted withdrawals on the exchange and declared bankruptcy. Because FTX was a major player in the crypto industry, other crypto projects that relied on the exchange were reporting fund losses one by one at the time.

Block Data Reference

Attacker address:

https://etherscan.io/address/0x59ABf383…1fd32b

https://bscscan.com/address/0x59ABf383…1fd32b

Incident Report

Protocol / Project FTX Group
Date of Incident
Attack Technique Other
Classification CeFi,Other
Primary Source View Post-Mortem #1 View Post-Mortem #2 View Post-Mortem #3 View Post-Mortem #4 View Post-Mortem #5 View Post-Mortem #6

Protocol Information

Protocol Type Exit Scam/Other
Affected Token FTT
Official Website ftx.com/
Protocol Twitter/X @FTX_Official
Team Public / Doxxed
Source Code Verified On-Chain

What the Attacker Needed to Succeed

Understanding the prerequisites for this type of attack helps auditors identify protocols that are most at risk and helps developers build better defenses.

Technical Knowledge Deep understanding of other and Solidity and EVM internals
Capital Required Seed capital to cover gas and initial position setup
On-Chain Access Ability to interact with smart contracts and deploy a custom exploit contract
Protocol Analysis Identification of the exploitable vulnerability in FTX Group's contract logic - root cause: cefi,other
Execution Speed Precise transaction ordering and timing to exploit the vulnerability within a single atomic block
Obfuscation Plan A strategy to launder and move stolen funds - typically through mixers, cross-chain bridges, or decentralized DEX swaps to resist tracing

What Auditors Should Check

Could this have been caught in audit? Likely — with a thorough Other audit checklist and test coverage

If you're auditing a protocol with similar architecture to FTX Group, these are the critical security checks that could have prevented this incident (November 2022).

  • Verify all logic paths related to Other are guarded by proper access controls and input validation
  • Review privileged functions (owner, admin, governance) for potential abuse vectors - centralization risks should be documented and bounded with timelocks or multi-sigs

Master these auditing techniques with hands-on labs and real exploit scenarios in the Smart Contract Hacking course.

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Post-Incident Timeline

  • 2022-11-12

    263,119,661 $USD worth of assets from the FTX's wallets were siphoned and transferred to an EOA address. 158,513 $ETH and 62,606,803 $USD worth of tokens remain at the address at the moment. This could be possible exploit by private keys compromise.

  • 2022-11-16

    We are seeing activity on FTX Drainer addresses on both BSC and Ethereum chains. The total funds transferred to the drainer address reached 319,916,924 $USD. Assets worth 21,696,310 $USD remain on the BSC address, and 298,220,614 $USD is on the Ethereum address. A huge part of tokens on the Ethereum address was swapped for $ETH, and the current Ether balance of the address is 235,392.

Sources & References

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