Blockchain infrastructure platform Paxos has burned over $15 million worth of tokens belonging to the FTX hacker.
On-chain data from blockchain explorer Etherscan shows that 8,000 Paxos Gold (PAXG) tokens worth $14.7 million were burned on Thursday, by sending them to a null address. When tokens are sent to a null address, they are effectively removed from circulation forever – a concept often referred to as “token burning” in crypto.
A transaction alert from on-chain monitoring service Watchers revealed that another 99 Paxos Gold (PAXG) tokens worth $900,989 were also burned on the same day.
🚨 FTX Hacker 4(0x9c43cb) sent 499 $PAXG ($900,989) to Null Address: 0x000…000(0x000000) at 2022-12-22 16:34:47 UTC
Transaction Hash: 0xd9a35c56a5567931763483d4cb226f280f580af98ee77bded9acf4713b1ef1d0#Watchers #0xScope— Scopescan (@0xScopescan) December 22, 2022
The tokens in question were associated with an account labelled “FTX account drainer” – an entity associated with stealing over $400 million worth of funds from the crypto exchange shortly after it froze withdrawals and declared insolvency.
Last month, Paxos said it had frozen $19 million worth of crypto from four Ethereum wallets associated with the FTX hacker. The platform said the move to freeze these tokens on-chain came after a request from U.S. Federal Law enforcement on Nov. 12.
At press time, Paxos had not issued a statement regarding the token burns.
Meanwhile, FTX’s liquidators have enlisted a team of forensic financial investigators from AlixPartners to trace where the missing funds may be, as per a report from The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried told independent crypto reporter Tiffany Fong that he had a “pretty decent sense” that the person behind the attack was a former employee or someone who used malware on an ex-employee’s computer.
