Axie Infinity CEO Transferred $3M Tokens Before Ronin Hack

The Axie Infinity CEO transferred $3 million worth of tokens before the Ronin hack and Sky Mavis claimed that they did so to brign more flexibility as a response to the sidechain attack so let’s read more today in our latest cryptocurrency news.

Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network as an Ethereum sidechain was hacked in March with $622 million worth of assets being stolen at the time of disclosure. The Axie Infinity CEO Trung Nguyen transferred $3 million worth of tokens before the hack was disclosed but today he said the claims of insider trading are baseless and false. The game Axie Infinity weathered one of the all-time biggest DeFi hacks in March when the bridge connecting the Ronin sidechain to Ethereum was hacked for $622 million worth of crytpo and now the CEO behind Axie admitted that he moved millions of dollars worth of tokens of the sidechain before the hack was disclosed.

As many of you know, I prefer to operate behind the scenes, but there is a story that dropped today that I want to address with the community, personally.

— Trung Nguyen (@trungfinity) July 28, 2022

That is according to the reports from Bloomberg analyzed blockchain data to discover that the crypto wallet by Sky Mavis CEO transferred up to $3 million worth of the game AXS governance token from the network to the exchange Binance. Nguyen’s token transfer occurred a few hours before Sky Mavis disclosed the ronin network hack a full week after the attack occurred and closed the access to the network until June. Sky Mavis representative Kalie Moore confirmed the transactions to Bloomberg after the publication shared the analysis with the company. She said:

“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.”

Moore added that the funds were transferred from the Nguyen wallet so that the AXS short sellers will not be able to front-run the news and suggested that the accusations of other motives regarding the nature of the transfer will be baseless. The Ronin Network hack happened on March 23 but it was not discovered for days and it was disclosed on March 29. The attacker stole 173,600 wrapped Ethereum and 25.5 million USDC stablecoins that were worth up to $622 million but $552 million when the attack happened.

Following the attack, Sky Mavis announced that it raised $160 milion in funding to facilitate user refunds and the bridge was reponed on June 28 with all users being reimbursed. Nguyen said that the AXS tokens were removed to Binance after the discussions with the exchange with Sky Mavis planned to aid in providing the user liqudity while restoring the bridge.