Alameda Wallets Funnel More Than $1.7M Through Crypto Mixers Overnight

Data negates the possibility of liquidators behind the fund transfers because of the use of mixing tools and extensive planning to hide the transaction paths.

30 crypto wallets connected to Alameda Research, the bankrupt sister firm of FTX crypto exchange, became active on December 28 after four weeks of inactivity. The wallets swapped and mixed more than $1.7 million worth of crypto assets via different crypto-mixing services.

Crypto mixers are mostly used by market exploiters and criminals to hide the transaction path so that the funds cannot be tracked to the original source.

Based on December 28 reports, the abrupt movement of funds from Alameda wallets barely days after Sam Bankman-Fried was released on bail raised lots of suspicions across the crypto space. Almost 24 hours later, it seemed the culprit behind these fund transfers used an extensive plan to hide transaction routes.

According to data published by the crypto forensic group Arkham, the first transfer of funds started with many addresses swapping tokens for Ether (ETH)/Tether (USDT), sending them to cryptocurrency mixers. Most of these transfers were tracked to two main wallets beginning with 0xe5D and 0x971.

Movement of funds from Alameda wallet Source: Arkham

These tokens from the Alameda wallet were first sent to an address beginning with 0x738, and then on to an address 0x64e. The 0x64e wallet then divides the ETH and sends it to smaller wallets, in sizes of mostly $200,000 and $50,000. After that, it was sent to mixers like Fixedfloat and ChangeNOW.

Movement of swapped ETH to smaller wallets Source: Arkham

Another wallet was then used to swap for stablecoins, where wallet assets were first swapped into USDT and then sent to Fixedfloat. Up to 800,000 USDT was swapped out using mixers, while another 400,000 USDT was funneled through other strategies. An extra 200,000 USDT worth of stablecoins were sent to the Bitcoin network using renBTC.

In general, $1.7 million worth of funds were swapped and sent through different mixing services as follows:

5 ETH via ChangeNOW (~$325k) 800,000 USDT via Fixedfloat 200,000 USDT via Curve SynthSwap to native Bitcoin (BTC) 200,000 USDT via Airswap 200,000 USDT via other crypto-mixing services

The movement of funds from the Alameda wallet funneled via mixing tools developed lots of noise in the crypto community. Many people question the timing of the fund transfers while others point toward the use of mixing services and the inability of authorities to prevent such a thing despite the matter currently being sub-judice.