Paxos successfully recovered 11,184 Paxos Gold (PAXG) tokens, valued at $20 million, thanks to a quick asset freeze when the FTX hack took place in November.
As Coin68 reported, on the morning of 12/11, the FTX exchange saw huge withdrawals from the exchange, recording up to $400 million in the form of various coins. Although it has not been confirmed who is behind it, many suspect that this may be an internal "play" because it happened right after 1 day of filing for bankruptcy.
Among the stolen assets was Paxos Gold (PAXG), a token secured by real gold held by Paxos. As soon as it became aware of the attack, the trust company quickly froze 11,184 PAXG (worth $20 million) from 4 wallets that were now controlled by hackers. As a result, about 6 weeks later, Paxos successfully regained all his possessions.
Specifically, Paxos recovered the assets by transferring the stolen PAXG tokens from an address that had been labeled "FTX Accounts Drainer" by Etherscan to a null address and burned them. Then mint the same amount into another wallet, thereby ending the process of escaping the property.
However, the money Paxos recovered accounted for only a small part of the attack. At one point, the FTX attacker's wallet held up to $302 million in ETH, much of which belonged to FTX's reserves. All have been swapped to BTC by hackers and through ChipMixer mixers to withdraw, so there is no way to get it back.
FTX's new director, John Ray III, revealed that FTX had stored private keys in its wallet in an unencrypted manner and applied very poor security controls, thus allowing the hack to take place easily. He also described FTX as "an unprecedented failure" and the hardest he's ever encountered in his more than 40-year career.
Source: Coin68
