Traders in South Korea blamed the Manta modular blockchain for dumping the recently launched Manta token. This happened immediately after listing on several major cryptocurrency exchanges.
South Korean crypto market participants said that on the day of listing on the local trading platform Bithumb, the Manta project decided to immediately start laundering funds.
Key Exchange Transfers Revealed
On X (formerly Twitter), a user under the nickname Definalist wrote that on the day of listing on Bithumb, about 2 million Manta – 75% of the total circulation of the coin on the exchange – were transferred to the wallet of a Korean representative of the business development project. Then he transferred them to the exchange wallet.
. @MantaNetwork was suspected of money laundering through Bithumb on the day of listing
– 2M $Manta transferred to personal wallet of Manta’s Korean BD
– 2M $Manta was deposited into Bithumb deposit wallet, accounting for more than 75% of Bithumb’s total circulation volume.
-… pic.twitter.com/uMWq6J6D37— Definalist (@definalist) January 18, 2024
Just five minutes after Manta was listed on Bithumb, the price of the token skyrocketed to $230—almost 100 times its opening price of $2.26.
The business development representative, meanwhile, dumped all 2 million tokens at a huge premium. In the end, his profit from the sale was about $5 million. He converted the Manta into Ethereum (ETH) and subsequently transferred it back to his wallet.
DDoS Attack After Listing
On January 18, the Manta network suffered a large-scale distributed denial of service (DDos) attack. Blockchain nodes are flooded with remote procedure call (RPC) requests. At the moment their number reached 135 million.
The project developers assured that all user funds are safe. The incident has since been resolved.
On the same day, Manta tokens were listed on several exchanges, including Binance, KuCoin and Bithumb. In the first few hours, capitalization exceeded $680 million. According to CoinGecko, since then the figure has rolled back to $533 million.
What’s Happening with Manta’s Price?
The asset is currently trading at $2.18, having strengthened by 6.4% over the past 24 hours. At the maximum, the token price reached $2.72, and at the minimum it broke through $2.02. Trading volume over the past day amounted to $826 million.
Earlier, the Manta team announced an airdrop among ecosystem users. During the distribution, developers will distribute 5% of the total supply of Manta tokens, which at the time of publication is estimated at $115 million.
About Manta Network
Manta Network is a modular blockchain for zero-knowledge (ZK) applications. It includes two networks:
- Manta Pacific is a modular L2 ecosystem for EVM-native ZK applications and dApps that want to provide the lowest cost and best experience for users.
- Manta Atlantic is the fastest L1 blockchain on Polkadot that provides programmable ZK privacy IDs and on-chain credentials via zkSBTs
Manta Network was created by a team of experienced programmers from prestigious institutions including Harvard and MIT. The project has received investments from many leading investment funds, including Binance Labs and Polychain Capital. The company has grown through participation in renowned accelerators including Alliance DAO and Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator.
