That means will probably be very tough for the thieves to abscond with their income in a spendable kind with out being recognized, says Michelle Lai, a cryptocurrency privateness advocate, investor, and advisor who says she’s been monitoring the actions of the stolen FTX funds with “morbid fascination.” But the actual query, Lai says, is whether or not figuring out the thieves will supply any recourse: After all, most of the most prolific cryptocurrency thieves are Russians or North Koreans working in non-extradition nations, past the attain of Western regulation enforcement. “It’s not a question of whether they’ll know who did it. It’s whether it will be actionable,” says Lai. “Whether they’re on-shore.”

In the meantime, Lai and plenty of different crypto-watchers have been intently eyeing one Ethereum address that’s at present holding round $192 million price of the funds. The account has been sending small sums of Ethereum-based tokens—a few of which seem to have little to no worth—to quite a lot of trade accounts, in addition to Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin and Ukrainian cryptocurrency fundraiser accounts. But Lai guesses that these transactions are probably meant to easily complicate the image for regulation enforcement or different observers earlier than any actual try and launder or money out the cash.

The pilfering of FTX—whether or not the theft totals $338 million or $477 million—hardly represents an unprecedented haul on the planet of cryptocurrency crime. In the late-March hack of the Ronin bridge, a gaming cryptocurrency trade, North Korean thieves took $540 million. And earlier this 12 months, cryptocurrency tracing led to the bust of a New York couple accused of laundering $4.5 billion in crypto.

But within the case of the high-profile FTX theft and the trade’s general collapse, tracing the errant funds would possibly assist put to relaxation—or verify—swirling suspicions that somebody inside FTX was answerable for the theft. The firm’s Bahamas-based CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, who resigned Friday, misplaced just about his complete $16 billion fortune within the collapse. According to an unconfirmed report from CoinTelegraph, he and two different FTX executives are “under supervision” within the Bahamas, stopping them from leaving the nation. Reuters additionally reported late final week that Bankman-Fried possessed a “backdoor” that was constructed into FTX’s compliance system, permitting him to withdraw funds with out alerting others on the firm.

Despite these suspicions, TRM Labs’ Janczewski factors out that the chaos of FTX’s meltdown may need offered a chance for hackers to take advantage of panicked workers and trick them into, say, clicking on a phishing e-mail. Or, as Michelle Lai notes, bankrupted insider workers may need collaborated with hackers as a method to recuperate a few of their very own misplaced property.

As the questions mount over whether or not—or to what diploma—FTX’s personal administration may be answerable for the theft, the case has begun to resemble, greater than any latest crypto heist, a really previous one: the theft of a half billion {dollars} price of bitcoins, found in 2014, from Mt. Gox, the primary cryptocurrency trade. In that case, blockchain evaluation carried out by cryptocurrency tracing agency Chainalysis, together with regulation enforcement, helped to pin the theft on exterior hackers reasonably than Mt. Gox’s personal employees. Eventually, Alexander Vinnik, a Russian man, was arrested in Greece in 2017 and later convicted of laundering the stolen Mt. Gox funds, exonerating Mt. Gox’s embattled executives.

Whether historical past will repeat itself, and cryptocurrency tracing will show the innocence of FTX’s employees, stays removed from clear. But as extra eyes than ever scour the cryptocurrency economic system’s blockchains, it is a surer wager that the whodunit behind the FTX theft will, in the end, produce a solution.