The CEO of Axie Infinity moved AXS worth $3 million to Binance. Before Talking About the Ronin Hack, Trung Nguyen, the CEO of Axie Infinity, took $3 million worth of AXS out of Ronin and sent it to Binance. This was hours before the $625 million hack was made public. Is it trading on inside information? Or just to stop short-sellers from getting ahead? Let’s dive in.
Here’s why the CEO of Axie Infinity moved money out before talking about the Ronin hack:
Just arrived. Trung Nguyen, the CEO of Axie Infinity, is said to have sent $3 million worth of AXS tokens hours before he told people about the $625 million Ronin Bridge hack. Bloomberg got the news after they looked at the on-chain data that crypto game creator Asobs shared on Twitter.
Bloomberg says that the transfer happened just 3 hours before Sky Mavis told everyone about the attack and cut off access to Ronin. The report said, “Anyone who knew what was going on would have had a strong reason to sell tokens in the system before they were temporarily locked down.” This could be an indication of insider trading.
What happened after the heist of $500 million worth of crypto
Since Sky Mavis announced the Ronin breach on March 29, AXS has dropped more than 70%, and as of this writing, it is trading at $19.34. Axie Infinity has been losing players because it has a P2E model that can’t be kept up for long.
Even so, the team moved quickly to raise money to pay back users and improve security to prevent future attacks. Sky Mavis reopened the Ronin bridge on June 28, and all users’ funds were backed up 1:1.
Clearly, the recent expose made a lot of people wonder why Nguyen did what he did. In a series of tweets, the CEO of Axie Infinity fought back, saying that all accusations of insider trading are “unfounded and false.”
He also said that the AXS transfer was needed so that short-sellers wouldn’t get the news first. In fact, the creators of the game also put $7.5 million into Ronin from a known Axie multi-sig wallet before stopping the bridge from working to avoid waking up the short-sellers.
“At the time, we [Sky Mavis] knew that the more AXS we had on Binance, the better our position and options would be,” said Kalie Moore, a representative for Sky Mavis. “This would give us the freedom to try different ways to get the needed loans or capital.”
