According to blockchain intelligence company ChainArgos, it has been discovered that Polygon Labs has a significant discrepancy in the allocation of its MATIC tokens compared to the stated distribution. There are as many as 400 million $MATIC tokens (currently valued at approximately $340 million) missing from the staking contract, and there are also suspicious fund flows pointing to addresses associated with the exchange Binance.
ChainArgos tweeted yesterday (15th) pointing out that Polygon Labs’ token economics and unlocking period for its MATIC token seem to differ from the actual unlocking situation.
The company also provided an official token unlocking plan chart and the calculated expected token amounts for each unlocking, for reference.
Firstly, ChainArgos states that based on observations, MATIC is managed by a locking contract and a foundation contract, both responsible for the automatic unlocking and management of all tokens. The former involves the release and circulation of over 10 billion tokens, while the latter participated in the initial listing of 1.2 billion MATIC tokens on the Binance Launchpad.
However, the company analyzed the unlocking situation of the locking contract and noticed that the unlocking pattern of the locking contract is irregular and the size of the gaps is inconsistent, which is significantly different from the official planned chart.
Suspiciously, according to the token distribution chart, the expected flow of the staking contract should have increased from 400 million to 1.2 billion MATIC tokens since the deployment of the staking contract in June 2020. However, the actual observed flow does not match this expectation, as it only increased from 0 tokens to 800 million MATIC tokens. In other words, there are 400 million MATIC tokens missing.
ChainArgos found that the missing 400 million tokens from the staking contract seems to have flowed to an address labeled as “Binance 33”, which is completely unrelated to staking. Subsequently, Binance 33 sent 300 million tokens to an address starting with “0x2f4”.
Interestingly, the address “0x2f4” also received 467 million tokens from the address “Matic: Market Marketing and Ecosystem” and sent them to Binance’s exchange wallet.
The company suspects that the Polygon Labs team may be collaborating with Binance to transfer tokens to the exchange for sale, and questions the fund flow and collaboration motives, stating that this could potentially affect the market price.
It is worth noting that another Twitter user, tmnxeq, commented below and claimed that they had already discovered suspicious activities by the team as early as June and July last year.
In summary, they pointed out that in the Polygon 2.0 whitepaper, Polygon Labs claimed to replace the existing MATIC token with the POL token, and stated that its average price over a 10-year period would be higher than $5. They considered this statement and assumption to be absurd, regardless of the current MATIC token price being consistently below $1. Such a statement could even attract the attention of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), as it involves expectations of returns to investors.
ChainArgos
Matic
POL
Polygon
Polygon 2.0
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