Axie Infinity head moved millions in game tokens before transaction freeze

The CEO of Axie Infinity moved millions of dollars worth of the game’s governance token, AXS, just before its parent company froze transactions following a US$620 million hack, Bloomberg reported. 

Axie Infinity developer Sky Mavis confirmed Bloomberg’s analysis of public data that linked the wallet of CEO, Trung Nguyen, to a large transaction of about US$3 million in Axie’s AXS tokens to crypto exchange Binance. 

Kalie Moore, a spokeswoman for  Sky Mavis, said Nguyen’s actions were an attempt to shore up the company’s finances. The game has reportedly been on a downward trend since late 2021, with lower trading volumes and AXS seeing sharp drops in value.

Moore added that Sky Mavis would be in a better position to secure financing if it had more AXS on Binance.

Following the article, Nguyen made a series of tweets, saying speculation of insider trading was “baseless and false.” He pointed out that Sky Mavis’s founding team deposited US$7.5 million from a known Axie multisignature wallet to the Ronin Network prior to the bridge closing to avoid triggering short-sellers.

Axie Infinity had suspended its Ethereum sidechain, Ronin Bridge, after it suffered the security breach in March. The hack resulted in the theft of 173,600 ether and about US$25.5 million in USD Coin stablecoins, worth around US$620 million at the time.

Sky Mavis had since raised US$150 million from Binance, Animoca Brands, Andreessen Horowitz, Dialectic, and Paradigm to help pay back users affected by the hack.

Axie Infinity had also been seeing users return, with NFT daily sales tripling on July 12. The game’s new update, Axie Infinity: Origin, was also getting more downloads and the company’s Land staking offering was also seeing high activity.

See also: Axie Infinity players are using SLPs in real life