FTX is dead, but its FTT token is very much alive and being actively traded. Why?

FTX has declared bankruptcy. But another mystery remains in this story, and that is of the exchange’s token, FTT. While most cryptocurrencies have plummeted in value in the past few weeks, the FTT token is still trading above the U.S. dollar per unit. What’s going on? Asking interesting questions that we don’t yet have the answers to.

A token of the exchange that no longer exists

It’s been more than two weeks since FTX filed for bankruptcy protection. After the FTT price collapsed abruptly on that event, the price of that token has frozen between $1.29 and $1.39 per unit (and has even gradually strengthened in recent days).

In fact, FTT has remained above one dollar since November 12, 2022. The token still hasn’t surpassed the historical low it hit in September 2019, when FTT was trading at $1.15 per unit. 

Today, the global trading volume of the exchange token backed by the bankrupt business is about $16 million a day. FTT recently hit a high of the week of $1.5. In other words, the FTX token continues to live on, even when the exchange itself no longer exists.

 

FTT anonymous whales

According to etherscan.io, the largest wallet currently contains 195,869,338 FTTs, or 59.55% of the total supply. It is officially known that before FTX collapsed and filed for bankruptcy, Alameda Research owned one of the largest volumes of FTT.

The second largest owner of FTT is the same person as the “FTX Accounts Drainer” hacker (the exchange was allegedly hacked by him before the shutdown). He now owns 45.85 million FTT tokens worth $61.44 million. 

In other words, FTT’s largest and second-largest addresses own a combined 73% of all tokens. Who is behind these addresses is still unknown.

 

Untouchable by FTX

Former Alameda CEO Caroline Allison has reportedly left Hong Kong to live in Dubai.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the former FTX CEO, is also openly living in his penthouse in the Bahamas, speaking at offline conferences. Prior to the collapse of the exchange, he was the manager of FTT’s largest wallet, but for some reason, that wallet has not been seized, it regularly makes several million dollars a week in transfers from FTT to Bitfinex. 

In the meantime, the hacker who allegedly hacked the exchange has already exchanged FTT for tens of millions of USDT. At the moment he continues to methodically withdraw large amounts of FTT from the second-largest wallet every week. Yesterday the press found out that the hacker, who attacked FTX, transferred at least 255 BTC (~$4.2 mln on the current exchange rate) to the OKX exchange for sale.

No public actions on the part of law enforcement agencies are visible for any of the above-mentioned persons yet.

 

Unsinkable FTT token

But the main thing that is not clear is how the token of a bankrupt exchange trades quite steadily at a price just above $1.

Against the background of constant sales of large volumes of FTT, there must be some “big buyer” who would provide counter-liquidity, keeping the price at a given level. Who is this mysterious whale? Why does he need the token of a bankrupt exchange that everyone is trying to get rid of?

Many exchanges also for some reason do not want to delist this FTX token, continuing to trade FTT as if nothing happened. Among them are the following major exchanges: Binance, Bitget, and Bitfinex.