In the aftermath of the March hack of the Ronin blockchain, Vietnamese game developer Sky Mavis, the entity behind the blockchain-based game Axie Infinity (AXS), is rejecting accusations of wrongdoing as some USD 3m worth of its native AXS token had reportedly been moved from Ronin to a Binance account in the hours preceding the attack’s discovery.
Sky Mavis claims that its CEO Trung Nguyen was redirecting the funds to his wallet with the aim to protect the company and aid users after the hack, Bloomberg reports.
The attackers hit Axie’s Ronin bridge, which allows users to send crypto back and forth between Ethereum (ETH) and Axie’s Ronin sidechain, leading to the exploit to the tune of more than USD 600m last March, making it one of the biggest hacks in the history of decentralized finance (DeFi).
In response to what he describes as “speculation of insider trading” related to the Ronin attack, which would benefit him financially, Nguyen tweeted that the “accusations are baseless and false,” added that,
“In fact, the Founding Team even deposited [USD] 7.5M from a known Axie multi-sig wallet TO Ronin Network prior to the bridge closing to avoid triggering any short-sellers watching.”
The CEO claimed that “the Founding Team chose to transfer it from my wallet to ensure that short-sellers, who track official Axie wallets, would not be able to front-run the news.”
Nguyen further claimed that Axie Infinity and its community are his life work, adding:
“I take ownership of the security breach, and will use it as a learning experience.”
Nguyen also said that “the Bridge has been re-opened with all player funds backed 1:1”, eliciting a range of reactions, predominantly supportive, from other Twitter users.
“The Axie Infinity community will continue to support you Trung, shun the non-believers,” said one Twitter user.
In contrast with this, another user asked the company’s CEO “[w]hy did it take so long to BUILD the bridge back up” and “what you were doing every week the bridge was down.”
Earlier this month, Sky Mavis unveiled a number of updates to the popular game’s infrastructure, including various upgrades, stating that there has been “an incredible amount of progress in refining and aligning the typical Ronin user experience.” This consisted of improving the asset on/off ramp interface, by simplifying or making it more user-friendly, they said and added:
“As we work rapidly to decentralize the Ronin network, there are a number of additional backend functions we need to build for validators, including voting processes, and various summary dashboards.”
Source: Cryptonews
