Manta Network Team Faces Money Laundering Allegations

The Manta Network community has raised suspicions of money laundering by the project’s team through Bithumb on the day their native token was listed on the exchange.

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Manta Network was suspected of money laundering through Bithumb on the day of listing.

? ? ??????? MANTA transferred to the personal wallet of MANTA’s Korean BD

? 2 Million #MANTA was deposited into a Bithumb deposit wallet,that accounts…

— Wise Advice (@wiseadvicesumit) January 19, 2024

Users allegedly discovered a transfer of 2 million MANTA to the personal wallet of a member of the Korean division. The funds were deposited on Bithumb, accounting for 75% of the exchange’s balance.

Five minutes after the listing, the coin’s price on the platform soared to $230. Following the sale of assets, the team member received 2094.7 ETH (~$5.35 million at the time of writing), which was transferred to their personal wallet.

Manta responded that they allocated part of the community funds to the Korean division as part of the existing tokenomics model.

According to co-founder Kenny Lee, a “very aggressive and calculated DDoS attack” began on the network simultaneously with the token launch on January 18. RPC functions of the nodes were overwhelmed with a massive number of fake requests, causing disruptions in connections between applications and the blockchain.

DDoS Attack Update on @MantaNetwork
Hey everyone, we are experiencing a calculated DDoS attack on the network. This happened at 9:30AM UTC, exactly the same time as our TGE event. Since that time, we have seen over 135m requests hit the RPC nodes, which indicates that this is a… pic.twitter.com/EgjUiOvRl0

— ?Kenny.manta ?? (?,?) (@superanonymousk) January 18, 2024

Lee assured that user funds were not threatened by the attack.

On January 19, the Manta team confirmed that the incident resulted in a large queue of transactions on the network, leading to increased transaction times and higher gas fees.

⚠️ Because of yesterday’s DDoS attack, the network has accumulated a large queue of recent transactions. This is leading to longer transaction times and impacts on gas fees. We are aware of this issue and working to resolve it.

— Manta Network (?,?) #MantaNewParadigm (@MantaNetwork) January 19, 2024

“We are aware of this issue and working to resolve it,” the developers added.

According to the MANTA/KRW pair chart on Bithumb, the token’s price reached a local peak of 6250 KRW ($4.67) in the second hour of trading. At the time of writing, the asset is trading at around $2.34. On Binance, MANTA quotes stand at $2.18.

Out of a total issuance of 1 billion tokens, 251 million MANTA are in circulation. The market capitalization is approximately $550 million (CoinGecko).

Earlier, the project announced the allocation of 12% of the token supply for two airdrops.