Earlier this year, hackers stole $622 million from the blockchain game Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network in March. Now reports say Sky Mavis’s CEO, Trung Nguyen, moved $3 million in crypto just before reporting the hack. Sky Mavis is the company behind Axie Infinity. Amid the Coinbase insider trading scandal, Nguyen denied any allegations of foul play.
Sky Mavis’s response to the Axie Infinity hack and insider trading allegations
“At the time, we (Sky Mavis) understood that our position and options would be better the more AXS we had on Binance,” wrote Sky Mavis spokesperson Kalie Moore in a statement to Bloomberg. “The Founding Team chose to transfer it from this wallet to ensure that short-sellers, who track official Axie wallets, would not be able to front-run the news.” Moore called all allegations of ulterior motives “baseless.”
Nguyen transferred the crypto about three hours before Sky Mavis reported the hack, which occurred on March 23. But the company waited nearly an entire week, until March 29, to disclose the stolen crypto. In response, Nguyen, who doesn’t often speak publicly, took to Twitter to address the situation. The Sky Mavis CEO reiterated Moore’s claims in a series of tweets.
“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,” Nguyen tweeted. “When the Founding Team discovered the security breach, we were in close contact with Binance to discuss the closing of the bridge, and how to ensure user funds would be restored as soon as possible.”
Nguyen denied accusations of insider trading and called Axie Infinity his life’s work.
The state of the Ronin Network
The Axie Infinity hack was one of the first in recent attacks on blockchain bridges. These bridges allow interoperability between different blockchain networks and have proven they’re particularly vulnerable to bad actors. In this case, the bridge connects the Ronin Network to the Ethereum mainnet. The Ronin Network bridge is functional, and Sky Mavis can fully back player funds as of publication.
