Millions Missing As FTX Mystery Deepens

Crypto exchange FTX was engulfed in further chaos on Saturday when the company said it had detected unauthorised transactions and analysts flagged that millions of dollars of assets had been moved from the platform in "suspicious circumstances".

FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday after traders rushed to withdraw US$6 billion from the platform in just 72 hours and rival exchange Binance abandoned a proposed rescue deal.

At least US$1 billion of customer funds have vanished from the platform, sources told Reuters on Friday. The firm's founder Sam Bankman-Fried had transferred US$10 billion of customer funds to his trading company, Alameda Research, the sources said.

New problems emerged on Saturday when FTX's US general counsel Ryne Miller said in a tweet that the firm's digital assets were being moved into so-called cold storage "to mitigate damage upon observing unauthorised transactions."

Cold storage refers to crypto wallets that are not connected to the internet to guard against hackers.

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said that around US$473 million worth of cryptoassets were "moved out of FTX wallets in suspicious circumstances early this morning", but that it could not confirm that the tokens had been stolen.

FTX's dramatic fall from grace has seen 30-year-old Bankman-Fried, known for his shorts and t-shirt attire, morph from being poster child of crypto's successes to the protagonist of the industry's highest-profile crash.

The collapse shocked investors and prompted fresh calls to regulate the cryptoasset sector, which has seen losses stack up so far this year as cryptocurrency prices collapsed. (Reuters)