Despite claims by the companies to the contrary, blockchain data shows crypto exchange FTX and sister company Alameda Research were very much connected from the beginning, said Niklas Polk, a research analyst at analytics firm Nansen. Polk said on-chain data shows the two companies had been closely intertwined since 2019. But making sense of the data could be the reason why no one saw the FTX collapse coming. 

“We could see that something’s going on, that they’re closely connected, that there are sufficient flows,” Polk said, referring to Nansen’s latest report. “But since FTX is a centralized entity, you can’t really see what’s happening inside [and] you can’t really know how much money should be there.”

“They’re still lying there today and we don’t know who those wallets belong to,” Polk said, adding that the tokens in some wallets “have never been touched.”