Original - Odaily
Author - Asher
Editor - Qin Xiaofeng
Yesterday, Binance’s 32nd phase project Arkham (Arkham) ranked first on the decline list with an intraday decline of 18%, and the maximum decline once exceeded 20%. With such a large drop, coupled with the recent transfer of 25 million tokens from the Arkham wallet address (6 million of which were transferred to the Binance address), rumors of the project team cash-out triggered widespread discussion in the community.
In the official introduction, Arkham calls itself the worlds first on-chain intelligence exchange, providing users with a market called Arkham Intel Exchange for on-chain intelligence information to circulate and trade, and uses AI-driven algorithm address matching engine. In addition, officials say that one of Arkhams investors is the unnamed founder of OpenAI (community interpretation is Sam Altman), who is deeply bound to the concept of AI.
Because of this, during the AI wave at the beginning of this year, Arkham also became one of the leading concept coins in the AI sector. Together with WLD, it was called the two direct descendants of OpenAI. The price once surged from 0.5 USDT in early February to 3.99 USDT, which was a very bright performance. Eye.
However, with the recent cooling off of the AI concept and yesterdays community rumors, the price of ARKM has been cut in half from its higher point.
Question: The team unlocked the market in advance, causing ARKM to plummet
In order to find out whether the Arkham team really unlocked the tokens in advance, we will extend the timeline slightly to April 3 for analysis of several suspicious transfers.
According to on-chain analyst Ember Monitoring, 25 million ARKM (approximately $62.5 million) tokens were unlocked and transferred out of the Arkham ecological fund and treasury.Among them, 6 million ARKM (approximately $15 million) tokens were transferred to Binance, of the 6 million ARKM tokens, 1 million were unlocked and transferred out from the Arkham treasury address, and the other 5 million ARKM tokens were unlocked and transferred out from the Arkham Ecological Fund address (as shown below).
Image source:etherscan
Image source:etherscan
This series of suspicious transfers also attracted the attention of data analysis platform Nansen. After detailed analysis, Nansen believes that it is possible that the Arkham team secretly unlocked some tokens and transferred them to the exchange for sale.
Image source:Nansen official recommendation
On-chain analysis agency 0xScope combined the ARKM token economic model to further dissect these suspicious transfers.
According to ARKM Tokenomics, 40.5% of its total supply of 1 billion tokens is allocated to investors, core contributors, and advisors, with these tokens locked for 1 year after opening and unlocked linearly over the next 3 years .Therefore, combined with ARKM being listed on Binance on July 18, 2023, the first unlocking of these tokens should be in July this year, and there are still 3 months left until unlocking.
According to the compiled data, the lock-up contract that originally should have held 40.5% of the tokens currently only has 35.5% left.0xScopeIt is believed that the team secretly unlocked this portion of the tokens and transferred them to the exchange in preparation for sale.
Image source:0xScope
Official clarification: Token transfer complies with governance norms
Arkham also responded on social media to the community’s doubts about the project team’s sell-off. According to officials, 20 million ARKM tokens were transferred from the foundation’s treasury to separate wallets, and the transaction was approved in the recent Arkham governance proposal. As follows:
Odaily checked and found that the proposal did exist and was officially voted on on March 24. The proposal calls for the establishment of Fund Pool I with 20 million ARKM from the foundations treasury, which will be managed by the Arkham Foundation and allocate ARKM as appropriate, including supporting development work, supporting early-stage encryption projects, incentivizing intelligence gathering, and supporting growth initiatives, such as in sports and media partnerships to drive network expansion.
However, what is interesting is that only 14 addresses participated in the voting, and the address with the first number of votes occupies absolute rights (the number of votes for the first place is 96 million ARKM, and the number of votes for the second place is only 3,800 ARKM). The address with the most votes (0x 0 f 88 starts) The contract records in recent months only interact with contracts related to the Arkham project and approve related transfers. It can be speculated that it should be an address controlled by the project party.Simply put, the Arkham Foundation approved a budget for itself.
(The most voted address on-chain activity)
In addition, Arkham stated that an additional 5 million ARKM tokens are coming from the ecosystem fund, which are unlocked based on published token economics. Based on the token economics, the ecosystem fund is unlocked over 5 years, starting from 70 million at launch. Ecosystem funds currently hold 260 million ARKM, which exceeds the number of locked tokens. (https://platform.arkhamintelligence.com/explorer/address/0xd6aBb89b27eADC93C79649aF472d238ED2B40165). Arkham stressed that “all team and investor tokens remain fully locked” and users can track them using the top holders feature on the platform.
Is the team secretly unlocking the market or is malicious FUD causing panic selling among retail investors?
To sum up, we can conclude that there are indeed 25 million ARKM tokens unlocked and transferred out from the ecological funds and treasury.
However, 0xScope believes that the transfer of 25 million ARKM tokens came from the locked tokens of the team, investors and consultants, but Arkham officially denied it, explaining that the transfer of 25 million ARKM tokens was the same as previous token transfers. , all of which are regular transfers of unlocked tokens (the transfer of 20 million ARKM tokens was approved in the proposal in late March).
However, whether from unlocked tokens or not, 6 million ARKM tokens did flow into Binance, and most of the tokens were transferred through market maker GSR using multiple addresses. In response to this issue, the Arkham Foundation did not give a clear explanation. Perhaps because prices have soared in the past month or so, the team wants to lock in part of the revenue in advance for future needs. But this behavior was undoubtedly the trigger for yesterdays 20% drop, which directly caused users to panic.
Odaily will also continue to pay attention to the follow-up trends of ARKM.
