Author: Asher, Odaily Planet Daily
Editor: Qin Xiaofeng
Yesterday, Binance's 32nd project Arkham (Arkham) topped the list of decliners with a daily decline of 18%, and the maximum decline once exceeded 20%. Such a large decline, coupled with the recent transfer of 25 million tokens from the Arkham wallet address (of which 6 million were transferred to the Binance address), the rumor that the project party was "cashing out and dumping the market" has triggered widespread discussion in the community.
In the official introduction, Arkham calls itself "the world's first on-chain intelligence exchange", providing users with a market called Arkham Intel Exchange for on-chain intelligence information to circulate and trade, and using an AI-driven algorithmic address matching engine. In addition, the official said that one of Arkham's investors is the unnamed founder of OpenAI (the community interprets it as Sam Altman), which is deeply tied to the concept of AI.
Because of this, in the AI ââwave at the beginning of this year, Arkham also became one of the leading concept coins in the AI ââsector, and was called "OpenAI's two major direct lines" together with WLD. The price rose from 0.5 USDT in early February to 3.99 USDT, which was an impressive performance.
However, with the recent cooling of the AI ââconcept and yesterdayâs community rumors, ARKMâs price has been halved from its high point.
Question: The team unlocked the market in advance and caused ARKM to plummet
In order to find out whether the Arkham team really unlocked the tokens in advance, we need to extend the timeline slightly to analyze several suspicious transfers on April 3.
According to the monitoring of on-chain analyst Ember, 25 million ARKM tokens (about 62.5 million US dollars) were unlocked and transferred from the Arkham Ecological Fund and Treasury. Among them, 6 million ARKM tokens (about 15 million US dollars) were transferred to Binance. Among these 6 million ARKM tokens, 1 million were unlocked and transferred from the Arkham Treasury address, and the other 5 million ARKM tokens were unlocked and transferred 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 the data analysis platform Nansen. After detailed analysis, Nansen believes that the Arkham team may have secretly unlocked some tokens and transferred them to exchanges for sale.
Image source: Nansen official Twitter
On-chain analysis agency 0xScope combined the ARKM token economic model to further analyze these suspicious transfers.
According to ARKM token economics, 40.5% of its total supply of 1 billion tokens is allocated to investors, core contributors and consultants. These tokens are locked for 1 year after the opening and unlocked linearly in the next 3 years. Therefore, combined with ARKM's listing on Binance on July 18, 2023, the first unlocking of these tokens should be in July this year, and there are still 3 months away from unlocking.
According to the collated data, the locked contract that was supposed to have 40.5% of the tokens currently only has 35.5% left. 0xScope believes that the team secretly unlocked this part of the tokens and transferred them to the exchange for sale.
Image source: 0xScope
Official clarification: Token transfer complies with governance regulations
Arkham also responded on social media to the community's questioning of the project's dumping. According to the official statement, 20 million ARKM tokens were transferred from the foundation treasury to a separate wallet, and the transaction has been approved in the recent Arkham governance proposal. As shown below:
Related proposals
Odaily Planet Daily verified that the proposal does exist and was officially voted on on March 24. The proposal requires the use of 20 million ARKM in the foundation's treasury to establish a fund pool I, which will be managed by the Arkham Foundation and will allocate ARKM as appropriate, including supporting development work, supporting early encryption projects, incentivizing intelligence gathering, and supporting growth plans, such as partnerships in sports and media, and promoting the expansion of the network.
However, it is interesting that only 14 addresses participated in the vote, and the address with the most votes had absolute power (the first place voted for 96 million ARKM, and the second place voted for only 3,800 ARKM). The contract records of the address with the most votes (starting with 0x0f88) in recent months have only interacted with the Arkham project-related contracts and approved related transfers. It can be inferred that it should be an address controlled by the project party. Simply put, the Arkham Foundation approved a budget for itself.
Proposal voting data
In addition, Arkham said that another 5 million ARKM tokens came from the Ecosystem Fund, which were unlocked according to the published token economics. According to the token economics, the Ecosystem Fund is unlocked over a period of 5 years, starting with 70 million at launch. The Ecosystem Fund currently holds 260 million ARKM, which exceeds the number of locked tokens. (https://platform.arkhamintelligence.com/explorer/address/0xd6aBb89b27eADC93C79649aF472d238ED2B40165). Arkham emphasized that "all team and investor tokens remain fully locked" and users can track them using the top holders feature on the platform.
Did the team secretly unlock the market and dump it, or was it malicious FUD that caused retail investors to panic sell?
To sum up, we can conclude that 25 million ARKM tokens have indeed been unlocked and transferred from the ecological fund and treasury.
However, 0xScope believes that the transfer of these 25 million ARKM tokens comes from the locked tokens of the team, investors and consultants, while Arkham officials denied it, explaining that the transfer of these 25 million ARKM tokens is the same as previous token transfers, which are regular transfers of unlocked tokens (of which 20 million ARKM tokens were transferred in a proposal approved in late March).
However, regardless of whether it came from unlocked tokens, 6 million ARKM tokens did flow into Binance, and most of the tokens were transferred in through market maker GSR using multiple addresses. The Arkham Foundation did not give a clear explanation for this issue. Perhaps because the price has soared in the past month, the team wants to lock in part of the income in advance for subsequent needs. But this behavior is undoubtedly the fuse of yesterday's 20% plunge, which directly caused users to panic.
Odaily Planet Daily will continue to pay attention to ARKMâs subsequent developments.
