FTX had, it seemed, hit rock bottom. Until someone—a thief or thieves who have yet to be identified—chose that particular moment to make things far worse. That Friday evening, exhausted FTX staffers began to see mysterious outflows of the company's cryptocurrency, publicly captured on the Etherscan website that tracks the Ethereum blockchain, representing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of crypto being stolen in real time.
He had a Ledger Nano—a USB drive hardware wallet—in his office that he offered to set up as a temporary refuge for the vulnerable money. Ramanathan set up a new wallet on his Ledger Nano at around 10:30 pm ET on November 11. The former FTX staffer remembers watching him check and double-check the password that he'd created for that wallet. Wang began sending FTX’s funds to it, and soon Ramanathan was holding between $400 and $500 million in the company’s crypto assets on a USB drive.