333 million in bitcoins disappeared from FTX days before the company filed for bankruptcy protection

5 days before FTX’s bankruptcy, 20,176 bitcoins left the exchange in less than 24 hours.

After Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ) told the public that Binance was going to dump all of its FTT tokens, people immediately began to observe FTX’s reaction. In addition to watching FTX’s reaction to CZ’s statements, people started looking at the beleaguered exchange’s crypto balances.

Many people are watching the Ethereum-based addresses that siphoned funds from the exchange on the same day it filed for bankruptcy protection. However, FTX also held at least 20,176.84 bitcoins on November 5, 2022. Yet the next day, FTX’s stock, reserves dropped to 220.26 bitcoins. On November 7, 2022, the data revealed that the exchange held only 0.25 bitcoin, as everything had been transferred long before the company filed for bankruptcy.

Last year, when FTX was one of the top exchanges in terms of overall crypto-currency trading volume, data from cryptoquant.com shows that the trading platform held 75,303 BTC and bitcoin was trading for about $46,000. At this exchange rate in mid-April 2021, the 75,000+ bitcoin stash was worth about $3.3 billion USD.

By mid-September 2021, FTX’s bitcoin reserves had fallen to around 20,000 and remained that way for more than a year. One site recorded a snapshot of the page on May 8, 2022, indicates that coinglass.com data showed FTX was the 11th largest market in terms of transaction volume.

On that day, FTX held 20,048.43 bitcoins according to coinglass.com data. Coinglass now places FTX in 18th place as it shows the exchange holding 7.03% of bitcoins. Cryptoquant.com’s metrics indicate that FTX’s wallet holds about 7 BTC on November 19, 2022. The 20,176.84 BTC was worth about $333 million, but when it was transferred, the funds were worth about $409 million.

🚨🚨 $BTC Exchange Reserves on #FTX hits 0 (ZERO !!)

Let’s pray in the name of Satoshi that this isn’t an exit scam and those coins have (just) moved to unlabelled FTX-wallets 🥶

Data by @cryptoquant_com
#Bitcoin #Crypto #Onchain #Data #Investments pic.twitter.com/Vazv6lzk0s

– Maartunn (@JA_Maartun) November 7, 2022

The 20,176.84 BTC leaving FTX was reported on via Twitter. Additionally, FTX’s bitcoins vanished before CZ announced to the public that Binance would be acquiring FTX, before later revealing that Binance pulled out of the deal for due diligence reasons.

As the concept of proof of reserves gained popularity, a number of exchange addresses were already publicly known.