$20 million worth of crypto held by U.S. government wallets were transferred to a wallet that has since sent one-third of the assets to exchanges.
An Ethereum wallet controlled by the U.S. government appears to have been hacked.
On Oct. 24, Arkham, an on-chain intelligence platform, flagged that $20 million worth of USDC, aUSDC, USDT, and ETH was “suspiciously” transferred from a wallet linked to the U.S. government.
The U.S. government wallet previously seized funds linked to the attackers behind the 2016 Bitfinex hack from nine separate seizures.
“The funds were moved to wallet 0x348 which has begun selling the funds to ETH,” Arkham said. “We believe the attacker has already begun laundering the proceeds through suspicious addresses linked to a money laundering service.”
The fund movements included $6.52 million worth of stablecoins withdrawn from the Aave lending protocol, indicating the U.S. government was earning yield on a portion of the assets.
ZachXBT, a popular on-chain sleuth, also concluded that the funds were likely stolen, as evidenced by the assets getting deposited onto exchanges including Nexchange, Switchain, and a nested exchange that leverages Binance for liquidity.
At the time of writing, the suspected attacker’s wallet holds nearly $13.2 million worth of assets, nearly entirely comprising aUSDC — USDC deposited in Aave.
The stolen assets included 13.7 million aUSDC, 5.45 million USDC, 1.12 million in USDT, and $446,920 worth of ETH.
The U.S. government holds more than $14 billion worth of cryptocurrency, more than 97% of which is BTC.
