Sky Mavis CEO Denies Insider Trading Accusation, Calls it ‘Baseless’

Trung Nguyen, the CEO of Sky Mavis, allegedly transferred native token AXN worth $3 million from Ronin blockchain to crypto exchange Binance hours before the Ronin hack was announced. The hack was made by the infamous North Korean fraudster group, Lazarus, in March, and compromised funds worth $622 million from the Ronin Network.

Bloomberg analyzed blockchain data and published a report on July 28, with the findings that revealed that in March, a hefty sum of tokens was repositioned from a digital wallet to Binance just three hours before the company reported that their Ronin network was hacked.

Kalie Moore, a representative from Vietnam-based game developer Sky Mavis, the parent company of Axie, confirmed this transaction was made by the firm’s co-founder and CEO Nguyen after Bloomberg shared its on-chain analysis with the organization.

Moore clarified, “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 further explained that funds were transferred from Nguyen’s wallet just so AXS short sellers wouldn’t be able to “front-run the news.”

However, after the detailed report was published by Bloomberg quoting Moore as a witness to the act, Nguyen called out the allegation of him being engaged in insider trading absolutely “baseless and false” in a recent tweet.

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

A YouTube user, pseudonymized as Asob, analyzed Ronin Network transactions from that period when the hack occurred and caught the attention of Bloomberg. Although Sky Mavis has declined to confirm if other wallets from company employees were also linked to large transactions, Asob has identified several other wallets that may belong to the firm’s employees. In his analysis, he stated.

We can see the money moved, the only question is what happened behind the money moving.