NEW YORK (AP) – Collapsed cryptocurrency trading firm FTX confirmed there was “unauthorized access” to its accounts, hours after the firm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday.
The company’s new CEO, John Ray III, said Saturday that FTX is disabling the ability to trade or withdraw funds and is taking steps to secure customer assets, according to a tweet by FTX general counsel Ryne Miller.  FTX is also coordinating with law enforcement and regulatory authorities, the company said.
It’s not clear exactly how much money is involved, but analytics firm Elliptic estimated on Saturday that $477 million was missing from the stock market.  Another $186 million was moved out of FTX’s accounts, but that may have been moving FTX assets into storage, Elliptic co-founder and chief scientist Tom Robinson said.
A debate formed on social media about whether the exchange had been hacked or someone who trusted the company had stolen funds, a possibility that cryptocurrency analysts could not rule out.
Until recently, FTX was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.  It was already a few billion dollars down when it filed for bankruptcy protection on Friday and its former CEO and founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, resigned.
The company had valued its assets between $10 billion and $50 billion and listed more than 130 affiliates around the world, according to its bankruptcy filing.
The collapse of the once-giant exchange is sending shockwaves through the industry, with companies that backed FTX cutting back on investments and prices of bitcoin and other digital currencies plummeting.  Politicians and regulators are calling for tighter oversight of the cumbersome industry.  Experts say the saga is still unfolding.
“We have to wait and see what happens, but I think we’re going to see more dominoes fall and a lot of people lose their money and their savings,” said Frances Coppola, an independent financial and economic commentator.  “And that’s really tragic.”
The timing and extent of the access the alleged hacker appeared to gain, siphoning money from multiple parts of the company, led Coppola and other analysts to believe it could have been an inside job.
FTX said on Saturday that it is moving as many digital assets as can be traced to a new “custodian cold wallet,” which is essentially a way to store assets offline without allowing remote control.
“It looks like the liquidators didn’t act quickly enough to stop some kind of withdrawal of funds from FTX after the bankruptcy filing, and that’s bad, but it just shows how complicated this thing is,” Coppola said.
Initially, some hoped that perhaps all the missing funds were liquidators or bankruptcy trustees trying to move assets to a safer place.  But it would be unusual for something like this to happen on a Friday night, said Molly White, a cryptocurrency researcher and fellow at the Library Innovation Lab at Harvard University.
“It looked very different from what a liquidator might do if they were trying to secure the funds,” he said.
White also said there are indications of possible insider involvement.  “It seems unlikely that someone not in the know could have done such a massive hack with so much access to FTX systems.”
The collapse of FTX highlights the need for cryptocurrencies to be regulated more like traditional finance, Coppola said.
“Cyrpto is no longer in the very early stages,” he said.  “We have ordinary people putting their life savings into this.”