Odaily Planet Daily News Michael Lewis, author of "The Big Short", disclosed in his new book "Going Infinite" that FTX once lost a lot of money in hacker attacks, but in order to avoid "encouraging" other hackers, they chose to keep the losses secret.
The largest hacking attacks occurred in March and April 2021. A trader opened an account on FTX and cornered the market on two coins with minimal trading volume: BitMax (BTMX) and MobileCoin (MOB). His purchases significantly pushed up the price of both coins, with MobileCoin going from $2.50 to $54 in just a few weeks.
Due to flaws in FTX's risk management system, the trader pushed the value of MobileCoin and BitMax to ridiculous levels so that he could borrow other higher-valued cryptocurrencies such as BTC from FTX, leaving only FTX A bunch of crashing coins. This time alone, FTX lost approximately $600 million, and the combined value of all losses caused by the theft exceeded $1 billion.