FTX estate moves $75M in ETH to Wintermute after Ether rebound
By Crypto Wire
September 22, 2026
Wallets tied to the FTX bankruptcy estate and Alameda Research moved 27,372 ETH—about $75.32 million—to algorithmic market maker Wintermute across six wallets as Ether rebounded, on-chain desks reported on September 23, 2026. PeckShield first flagged a 23,639 ETH (~$65 million) leg at 02:03 UTC, while EmberCN and Lookonchain tallied the combined six-wallet flow and described the estate as commissioning Wintermute to sell.
Explorer detail on the largest hop is precise: at 20:54:59 UTC on September 22, block 26,035,546 recorded 23,639.225 ETH worth $64,980,921 at a $2,753.25 reference price via sendMultiSig into an address labeled Wintermute 5 (0xF02e86D9…17fE0713). EmberCN pointed to Arkham-tagged receiving cluster 0xCe84449A8Ebec019AC110a4b6662E55d0fD9f228 for the broader six-wallet package.
That routing choice is the culture beat. Earlier estate liquidations from the same wallet cluster often dumped straight onto Binance and Coinbase. Shipping into Wintermute instead is the quieter OTC or delegated-execution path—less visible on CEX books, harder to front-run—while the seller remains the same forced-recovery actor that has haunted crypto lore since the November 11, 2022 Chapter 11 filing in Delaware (case 22-11068).
Wintermute was already active on ETH sell-side this month. On September 11, Crypto Times reported the firm moved 61,847 ETH (~$160.3 million) onto Binance and Coinbase as Ether rejected roughly $2,667. The FTX/Alameda cluster has also used Wintermute before—including a May 6, 2024 pack of about 2,000 ETH (~$6.3 million) plus 860 XAUT (~$2 million) first flagged by PeckShield.
Creditor-repayment context keeps the story from being a random whale print. The estate’s July 2026 distribution alone was about $900 million, with some claim classes paid at or above 100% of November 2022 petition-date value under the FTX Recovery Trust. Residual tokens are being sold into strength after years of recovery—not as a first fire sale—so a rebound window is exactly when desks expect another tranche.
What the transfer does not confirm is an instant open-market dump. ETH at Wintermute can sit in inventory, hedge into derivatives, or work off over hours and days. No public FTX Recovery Trust statement had confirmed this specific batch at the time of the alerts. The observable fact is simpler: after ETH bounced, a known forced seller delivered a ~$75 million block to one of crypto’s largest market makers.
For On-Chain Culture & Lore, FTX remains the industry’s longest-running estate drama—multisig hops, Arkham labels, PeckShield pings, and market-maker handoffs instead of stadium CEX deposits. Traders watching NFT and ETH beta into year-end should treat this as supply overhang with uncertain timing, not as a confirmed minute-by-minute sell tape. Watch Binance and Coinbase ETH books for any follow-through Wintermute distribution in coming sessions.
Prior chapter marks on the same saga help readers place the size. The cluster moved about $59 million in October 2023, deposited ETH to Coinbase and Binance in February 2024, and liquidated nearly $100 million in May 2024. Related seized wallets tied to the case were emptied by the U.S. government in July 2026 after forfeited FTX/Alameda tokens had already been flowing through Coinbase Prime earlier in the year. Against that ledger, a $75 million Wintermute handoff is another chapter—not the climax.
NFT desks tracking ETH beta should keep the distinction between transfer and sale. The lore-friendly screenshot is the multisig into Wintermute 5; the market-relevant unknown is how fast that inventory hits spot. Until Wintermute prints show up as CEX deposits or until the Recovery Trust speaks, cite the PeckShield/EmberCN/Lookonchain numbers and the block timestamp—not invented sell pressure percentages.
8bitcrypto will watch for any Trust confirmation and for follow-on Wintermute→exchange hops in the next sessions. For now the culture desk logs another FTX estate ghost print riding the rebound: six wallets, 27,372 ETH, ~$75.32 million, Wintermute as the quiet intermediary.
Bottom line: 27,372 ETH (~$75.32M) from FTX/Alameda estate wallets to Wintermute across six addresses; largest confirmed leg 23,639.225 ETH at $2,753.25 into Wintermute 5; monitors call it a commissioned sale path, not a CEX deposit; Trust confirmation of this batch was still absent at alert time.
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