Axie Infinity CEO pulled out $3 million of crypto before $600 million hack was announced

pcgamer.com:

While the gaming mainstream remains deeply distrustful of anything associated with crypto, one of the apparent successes was Axie Infinity: a Pokémon-style game built around pets called Axies that can be traded, battled and, of course, are claimed to have some sort of 'real' value. Axie Infinity's ecosystem was valued in the hundreds of millions. Then, on March 23, the company's 'sidechain' Ronin network was hacked, with the perpetrators stealing Ethereum and USDC stablecoins that were at the time valued in the region of $600 million.

The game's developer Sky Mavis was forced to acknowledge the hack and disable token withdrawal. But not before Trung Nguyen, the CEO and co-founder, transferred $3 million worth of AXS, Axie's main currency, from the game's blockchain into Binance, a crypto exchange.

I appreciate that this is becoming a word salad of crypto terminology. The important point is that, when the outside world was unaware of the hack, or that trading in the game would be suspended as a result, a key inside player transferred a lot of value out of the Axie ecosystem. Oh: and no-one should have realised.

The transactions were first noticed and analysed by Asobs, a youtuber who analyses the crypto scene(opens in new tab). They were tipped off about a wallet that had moved 48,838 AXS tokens from Ronin (the sidechain network) to Binance, a huge amount, and managed to dig back through this wallet's transactions to see it had received the largest initial payment of AXS tokens when the game was launching.

Asobs then tracked down further wallets allegedly belonging to Sky Mavis employees through this method, a great tactic because the studio transfers AXS to employees regularly. Several of these had also made large