Axie Infinity CEO Denied Allegations Of Insider Trading

Axie Infinity CEO denied the allegations of insider trading and blamed some media outlets for focusing on the speculation while totally ignoring the achievements that were made by his company after the Ronin hack so let’s have a closer look at today’s latest cryptocurrency news.

The co-founder and Axie Infinity CEO denied allegations and accusations against him of being engaged in insider trading saying they are baseless and false. However, he did admit transferring $3 million worth of AXS to ensure that the short-sellers will not be able to front-run the news. The Ronin Bridge as we saw in March this year, became the victim of the biggest cryptocurrency hack and bad actors managed to breach the security and drained $173,000 ETH. The assets equaled more than $600 million at the time.

The attack grabbed society’s attention and numerous agencies carried out investigations to find out who was behind the attack. The Federal Bureau of Investigation stated that the perpetrator is the North Korean hacking group under the name Lazarus Group. Despite the theft, however, Axie Infinity’s team promised to reimburse the affected clients and the bridge restarted operations with all of the funds returned. When all seemed like just a bad memory, the recent coverage by Bloomberg accused the Chief Executive Officer of Axie Infinity of moving $3 million worth of coins from the platform to Binance just before the incident.

The CEO was fast to respond to the charges and said that his story includes speculation of insider trading. Hitting the $3 million transfer mark, he said it did happen but the goal was to stop AXS short sellers from front-running the news. Nguyen stated that the team moved $7.5 million from the Axie Multi-sig Wallet to Ronin Network and eased the turbulence caused by the hack. The executive also said he is proud of the fact that the operations were restored and the victims received their stolen funds:

“My life’s work is Axie Infinity and the community we’ve created together. I take ownership of the security breach and will use it as a learning experience.”

A month after the attack, Changpeng Zhao the CEO of Binance  informed that his company received up to $6 million of the $620 million stolen:

“The DPRK hacking group started to move their Axie Infinity stolen funds today. Part of it made to Binance spread across over 86 accounts. $5.8M has been recovered. We have done this many times for other projects in the past, too.”