Hours before Sky Mavis announced the massive Axie Infinity hack in March (considered one of the biggest cyber-attacks in crypto history), the game’s CEO, Trung Nguyen, made a transfer of 3 million Axies to Binance. . Find out the details here!
For those who do not remember, in mid-March the crypto game Axie Infinity suffered a major hack (one of the largest cyber-attacks in cryptocurrency history), in which Ethereum and USDC stablecoins worth more than $600 million were stolen. Although a large part of the players were harmed, since the cryptographic tokens that many had saved have financial value, it seems that the CEO and co-founder of the game Play to Earn, Trung Nguyen, he made a transfer of around 3 million Axies to Binance before the game network was hacked.
In response to the hack, the developer of Axie Infinity, Sky Mavis, disabled the withdrawal of tokens from the game, freezing the assets of its users before they could react to the bad news. However, before this happened, Nguyen transferred a large amount of crypto tokens to Binance, the exchange platform with the highest trading volume in the world.
The person who noticed this particular transfer was a user of Youtube called asobswho analyzed the details of the transaction and connected it to a wallet controlled by Nguyen based on past transactions. Once he shared that information with Bloomberg, the outlet confirmed the data and contacted the company’s spokeswoman, Kalie Moore.
Moore said Nguyen he made the transfer to shore up the firm’s finances and ensure it could provide liquidity to its users as it restored access to funds through Binance. “At that 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 to secure the loans/equity required. The Founding Team decided to transfer it from this wallet to ensure that short sellers, who track official Axie wallets, cannot get ahead of the news.“said the spokeswoman.
Once this news began to circulate, Nguyen posted a thread on Twitter where he repeats what he said Moore adding that his team had been in contact with Binance after the attack was discovered to “ensure that user funds are restored as soon as possible“. He also clarified that the insider trading speculations being made are “baseless and false“.
As for what happened after the cyberattack, Sky Mavis secured $150 million in funds to help reimburse players who were harmed. Also, Nguyen said that all user funds are now backed 1:1.
However, something that seems not to have been taken into account is the considerable drop in the value of Ethereum in the last three months. This means that players won’t get the money they could have made months earlier, but only get back around a third of what they lost. Since the hack was announced, the value of an AXS token has dropped from around $64 to $17.