The recent headlines concerning Axie Infinity’s $600 million hack of the Ronin Network bridge astound everyone. Before the hack was announced, about $3 million in AXS tokens were reportedly transferred through a wallet belonging to Sky Mavis’s co-founder and CEO.
Asobs, a crypto Youtuber, is the first to notice the AXS transaction from the wallet, and he also attempts to call into question some transactions that occurred between Sky Mavis employees’ wallets.
According to reports, Trung Nguyen’s digital wallet made a large transfer to Binance for $3 million in AXS tokens nearly three hours before they disclosed the Ronin network hack.
Sky Mavis representative Kalie Moore confirmed the transaction to Bloomberg after the publication shared its analysis with the company.
Moore stated that funds were transferred from Nguyen’s personal wallet so that AXS short sellers would not be able to front-run the news, explaining that the funds were moved ‘to shore up the company’s finances during the crisis’ and ‘provide liquidity to its users’.
“At the time, we (Sky Mavis) understood that our position and options would be better the more AXS we had on Binance. This would give us the flexibility to pursue different options for securing the loans/capital required,” she said.
Sky Mavis is a startup that creates the video game Axie Infinity, which allows players to trade and earn crypto tokens. The hack, allegedly carried out by a North Korean hacker group known as ‘Lazarus,‘ forced the game developer to essentially freeze the assets of its users before they could react to the news.
Nguyen tweeted about the situation, confirming the transfer “to be able to provide liquidity so that Ronin users would be able to withdraw AXS, SLP, and wETH as soon as possible”.
“This story includes speculation of insider trading. These accusations are baseless and false. In fact, the Founding Team even deposited $7.5M from a known Axie multi-sig wallet to Ronin Network prior to the bridge closing to avoid triggering any short-sellers watching.”
Also Read: Axie Infinity’s Ronin Bridge Restored 3 Months After $600M Hack
