The native token of Manta Network began trading on various exchanges yesterday. However, due to a DDOS attack on Manta’s mainnet RPC nodes (according to official statements), the nodes were accessed 135 million times in a short period of time, causing users to be unable to claim and sell tokens from the airdrop at the opening (although the official claimed that the issue had been fixed last night, most users were still unable to withdraw the airdrop at the time of writing this article). However, during the period when most users were unable to sell tokens, a strange transfer transaction appeared on the chain, sparking discussion in the Korean community.
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Accusations of market manipulation and money laundering against the Manta team
Manta’s cold treatment of public participants
According to information from the Korean community Definalist, when Manta’s mainnet RPC nodes were under a DDOS attack, 2.7 million Manta tokens were deposited into Bithumb, with the majority coming from a single wallet address. Definalist stated that further investigation into the source of these Manta tokens revealed signs of money laundering.
Specifically, a large deposit (approximately 2 million MANTA) on the Bithumb exchange can be traced back to wallet A, which is associated with the account name “Sumvely” on Ethereum’s OpenSea (now renamed “velty”) and owns an NFT used as a personal avatar by Manta’s Korean business development team.
Further digging revealed that after wallet A deposited a large amount of MANTA into Bithumb, there was a noticeable increase in buying activity in the ETH trading pair on the Bithumb exchange.
Shortly after, wallet A withdrew approximately 2,094 ETH from the Bithumb exchange. This series of events – wallet A depositing a large amount of Manta, Manta being listed on Bithumb, detecting a large number of Ethereum buy orders, and transferring a large amount of Ether to wallet A – strongly suggests that “the Manta team used the Korean market on the day of listing as a liquidity outlet to sell a large number of tokens.”
In addition to accusing the team of selling tokens during the network outage, Definalist further pointed out that this series of actions could involve money laundering (considering that an employee who has only been working for 5 months is unlikely to have such a large share, so the MANTA tokens probably belong to the team rather than an individual) and tax evasion.
Although the Manta team denies Definalist’s accusations and claims that the funds were intended for expanding the Korean market, and that the funds associated with the BD address are operational expenses of the Korean subsidiary, Definalist does not seem to accept this explanation.
In fact, the controversy surrounding the issuance of Manta Network tokens does not end there. Manta was originally a Polkadot ecosystem project and held a token public sale on the Tokensoft platform in 2021, raising $28.8 million. However, participants have not received the tokens so far, and both Manta Network and Tokensoft have been unresponsive, providing no relevant information. Participants are highly frustrated, not even knowing which version of MANTA tokens they will receive.
