The native token of Manta Network began trading on various exchanges yesterday, but due to a DDOS attack on the Manta mainnet RPC node (official explanation), it was accessed 135 million times within a short period of time, causing users to be unable to claim and sell tokens from the airdrop at the opening (although the official statement last night claimed that the issue had been fixed, at the time of writing this article, most users were still unable to withdraw the airdrop). However, during the period when most users were unable to sell tokens, a strange transfer transaction appeared on the chain, sparking discussions in the Korean community.
Manta team accused of market manipulation and money laundering
Manta cold treatment of public sale participants
According to information from the Korean community Definalist, when the Manta mainnet RPC node was under a DDOS attack, 2.7 million Manta tokens were deposited into Bithumb, with most of them 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 on the Bithumb exchange (about 2 million MANTA) can be traced back to wallet A, which has an account name “Sumvely” on Ethereum OpenSea (now renamed to “velty”) and owns an NFT used as a personal avatar by Manta team’s Korean BD.
After further investigation, it was found that wallet A deposited a large amount of MANTA into Bithumb, and significant buying activities of ETH pairs appeared on the Bithumb exchange simultaneously.
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 listing on Bithumb, detecting a large number of Ethereum buy orders, and transferring a large amount of ETH to wallet A — essentially confirms that “the Manta team used the Korean market on the day of listing as a liquidity exit to sell off a large amount of tokens”.
In addition to accusing the team of selling tokens during the time of network paralysis, Definalist further pointed out that these actions may involve money laundering (considering that an employee who has only been working for 5 months is unlikely to own such a large share, so this MANTA token is likely owned by the team rather than an individual) and tax evasion.
Although the Manta team denies Definalist’s accusations and states that the funds were for expanding the Korean market, and the funds related to the BD address are operational expenses of the Korean branch, 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 at the time.
However, participants have not yet received tokens, and Manta Network and Tokensoft have been quite passive about the matter, not releasing any relevant information. Participants are outraged by not even knowing which version of MANTA token they will receive.