Binance offers a reward of 5 million USD after controversy over the Vietnamese project

Binance co-founder Yi He offered a reward of 5 million USD to anyone who finds evidence of corruption by exchange staff after Sky Mavis's Ronin token was listed.

On February 5, Binance announced the listing of the Ron token, part of the Ronin project of Sky Mavis , the company behind the blockchain game Axie Infinity . Data from CoinGecko shows that last week, Ron increased in price by 30%. But just an hour after Binance announced the "floor listing", the token price dropped 18%.

In one day, Ron fell from 3.5 USD to 2.8 USD, a decrease of 26%. This is a rare thing when a new project is listed on Binance. This caused great debate across social networks. Many people believe that Binance employees leaked the information, some people took the opportunity to buy tokens at low prices and sell them off when prices were high because they were listed on Binance. Ron was under great pressure on liquidity, leading to price drops as soon as it went public.

Ron token price chart before and after the listing announcement on Binance. Screenshots

Immediately afterwards, Binance co-founder Yi He responded: "Heated discussions have taken place regarding Ron's price plummeting after listing. The exchange has conducted an investigation and confirmed that there are irregularities." relating to transactions".

Data collected on the blockchain shows that after Binance made the announcement, one wallet sold off one million USD of Ronin on OKX, causing the token price to turn around. Two weeks ago, Coinbase Director Conor Grogan claimed to have found evidence of multiple wallets buying tokens just minutes before they were listed on Binance, then immediately selling them at a profit. Projects must go through many strict reviews before being listed on Binance. The scale of the world's largest exchange is considered one of the guarantees for the project's liquidity. That's why projects all aim to be on Binance, the token price will almost increase sharply in the initial stages of listing.

Yi He does not shy away from the fact that some users believe that Binance has an insider, spreading information to make a profit. However, he said: "Binance will reward from 10 thousand USD to 5 million USD to those who are willing to report fraud or detect signs of corruption from company employees. The identity of the whistleblower will be disclosed." security. Employees will be warned for the first violation and fired for repeat violations." In addition, to limit controversy in the community, tokens with leaked information will also be delisted from the exchange.

Ronin token icon. Photo: Khuong Nha

Binance also announced that it will carry out an "overhaul" regarding the token listing process. Any project that hires corrupt employees who are fired will be permanently blacklisted. To avoid risks, He advises projects to send information to the floor to check employee backgrounds.

Previously, Ronin attracted attention in the community when he was attacked by hackers and stole 600 million USD at the end of March 2022. CoinDesk site calls this the largest hack in DeFi history.

Ronin Network is a secondary blockchain, built by Sky Mavis to serve the development of the game Axie Infinity . This blockchain helps overcome some of the problems of the Ethereum blockchain such as high fees and easy network congestion.

At that time, Ronin Network said the blockchain was built with nine validation nodes. Each deposit or withdrawal transaction will now require at least five validating nodes. In the above attack, hackers successfully attacked five nodes, including four nodes of Sky Mavis and one of Axie DAO. The deeper reason is from Axie Infinity 's rapid growth in 2021. The large number of users caused Sky Mavis in November 2021 to request the right to self-authenticate transactions on behalf of Axie DAO. A month later, this was discontinued, but access to the validation list was not revoked. Hackers took advantage of this vulnerability to perform the above withdrawal transactions. Eight days after announcing the hack, Axie Infinity said it had successfully raised $150 million to compensate players. The Ronin network was also upgraded later and authorities repeatedly announced the recovery of millions of dollars from the attacker.