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ChainArgos Tracking: 4 billion MATIC tokens missing from Polygon staking contract, flowing to suspicious Binance address?

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ChainArgos Tracking: 4 billion MATIC tokens missing from Polygon staking contract, flowing to suspicious Binance address?

According to the blockchain intelligence firm ChainArgos, it has been discovered that Polygon Labs actually has a discrepancy of up to 400 million $MATIC tokens in its staking contract compared to the reported distribution. The current market value of this discrepancy is approximately $340 million. Additionally, there have been some suspicious fund flows pointing to addresses associated with the exchange Binance.

ChainArgos: Suspicious Fund Flow of MATIC Token

ChainArgos tweeted on the 15th that there seems to be a discrepancy between the token economics and unlocking period of Polygon Labs' token MATIC and the actual unlocking situation.

Official MATIC token unlocking plan

The company also provided an official token unlocking plan chart and their calculated expected token amounts to be unlocked for each occasion in a spreadsheet for reference.

MATIC Token Unlocking Misaligned with Public Plan

Firstly, ChainArgos stated that by observation, it is noted that MATIC is managed by a locking contract and another foundation contract, both responsible for automatic unlocking and managing the circulation of all tokens.

The former involves the release and movement of over 10 billion tokens, while the latter participated in the initial 1.2 billion MATIC tokens listed on Binance Launchpad.

Unlocking situation of the locking contract

However, the company analyzed the unlocking situation of the locking contract and noticed that the unlocking pattern of the locking contract was irregular, with inconsistent gap sizes, which is significantly different from the official plan chart.

4 Billion MATIC Missing in Staking Contract

Suspiciously, according to the token distribution chart, since the deployment of the staking contract began in June 2020, the expected flow of tokens in the staking contract should have increased from 4 billion to 12 billion MATIC.

Amount of MATIC in the staking contract

However, the observed actual flow does not align with this expectation, only increasing from 0 to 8 billion MATIC.

In other words, 4 billion MATIC is unaccounted for.

Did Funds Flow to a Binance Address?

ChainArgos found that the missing 4 billion tokens from the staking contract seemed to have flowed to an address labeled as "Binance 33," an address completely unrelated to staking. Subsequently, Binance 33 sent 3 billion 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, expressing doubts about the fund flow and collaboration motives, stating that this could potentially affect market prices:

Observing the fund flow of this address and comparing it with the price chart could be a good indicator of predicting the price top and a market downturn.

Polygon Labs Still Raises Other Suspicions

Interestingly, another Twitter user, tmnxeq, also commented below, claiming to have noticed suspicious behavior from the team as early as June and July last year.

In short, he pointed out that Polygon Labs stated in the Polygon 2.0 whitepaper that they would replace the existing MATIC token in the ecosystem with the POL token, claiming that the average price over a 10-year period would exceed $5.

He finds this claim and assumption extremely absurd, regardless of the current token price of MATIC being consistently below $1, and suggests that such statements could even attract attention from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) concerning investor expectations and related matters.