ETH dumps

A handful of Top 100 assets, including Trust Wallet and Casper, are in the green on an otherwise dismal Monday morning that brings a fresh round of reverberations related to the fall of the Sam Bankman-Fried crypto empire.

Once the second-largest crypto exchange, FTX ten days ago filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO. Fallout continues to impact a sector already frostbitten from a winter that began last spring.

“The market is in wait and watch mode to see whether there are any other entities that could fall,” Luno's Vijay Ayyar told CNBC.

Amidst FTX chaos, some $477 million in crypto assets were stolen from the reeling exchange in an apparent hack. “Unauthorized transactions” occurred, FTX publicly confirmed, declining to give specifics. An estimated $290 million wound up converted to Ethereum, washed in plain view of on-chain trackers.

One of them, Chainalysis, declared yesterday that the stolen funds were "on the move," an assertion to which major coin holders can attest.

The hacker who apparently drained FTX wallets has sold off an illicit stash of ETH, swapping it for BTC and doing no favors for a crypto sector on the edge of despair – and yet surprisingly resilient.

ETH slipped by as much as 7% earlier today. Over the weekend, Decrypt, citing PeckShieldAlert, reported that a most dubious wallet, dubbed FTX Accounts Drainer, had swapped thousands of ETH for renBTC, a form of wrapped BTC, and then converted them into BTC. ETH, as the story unfolded on social media, tumbled toward unsettling $1,100 levels.

As of 8 a.m. (EST), the second-largest crypto stoically trudged back to $1,125, as partly reflected by a 0.6% gain over one hour.

BTC declined 3% to $16,100. That was over 24 hours as of 8:02 a.m. (EST). CoinGecko recorded the largest crypto as having slipped to $15,976.89 late Sunday night.

A bad actor brazenly laundering digital booty "obviously adds a direct selling pressure on Ethereum and it affected other tokens,” said Yuya Hasegawa, an analyst at Bitbank.

Hedge fund heavyweight Bill Ackman pumped hot gas into Helium, a decentralized WiFi network under scrutiny for inflating its relevance.

In a tweet thread, Ackman, well-known as an "activist" investor, rousingly cheered HNT but its price did not expand. The 102nd-largest crypto was $2.20, down 8% over 24 hours as of about 8 a.m. (EST), per CoinGecko.

Helium, Ackman trumpeted in an attention-grabbing thread, is an example of real-world, value-add success, having created a global network used by the likes of Lime, a bike-share giant, to track devices.

However, Helium has been accused of using fraudulent endorsements from Lime, CoinDesk pointed out.

Ackman insists despite the recent collapse of FTX, he remains bullish about crypto. He also reportedly has a stake in ORIGYN Foundation, described as a project that “unites industry leaders from art, luxury, media, entertainment, sports and more with token holders.”