Sui Foundation under scrutiny again for allegedly quietly selling off $400 million worth of SUI tokens.

Recently, the price of the Sui token on the Move language public chain has been skyrocketing, leading many to draw parallels with the trend of TON earlier this year. However, crypto influencer @lightcrypto revealed on Twitter here that during this period of almost vertical price increase, the Sui Foundation has secretly unloaded $400 million worth of tokens. This assertion aligns with the findings of several local Korean media outlets and professors in the past few months. However, the Foundation later refuted this claim, stating that the address in question belongs to a partner and not the Foundation itself.

Sui FDV Reaches a Quarter of Solana, Analyst Questions Significant Premium

@lightcrypto stated that what puzzled him the most in the past few weeks was SUI, which saw its price soar fivefold from the bottom of $0.45. He then began to examine the token's fundamentals, saying, "Buying SUI at a FDV of $23 billion no longer seems justifiable when considering that its trading price is a quarter of Solana's valuation. Can anyone truly prove that SUI is showing a quarter of Solana's potential?"

He then mentioned the issue of foundation selling, stating, "Insiders, possibly a large foundation wallet, have sold $400 million worth of tokens throughout the entire rally and have begun selling large amounts of tokens below market prices. These insiders, who may be the ones most knowledgeable about the token's value, are offloading hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens to retail investors through information asymmetry."

Korean Professor and Media Voice Concerns About Sui's Selling Activities

Professor @clayop from Hanyang University in Korea had already noticed this phenomenon back in August last year when he stated that 0x7f3b9 received 310 million tokens from the foundation address 0x341fa on June 16 and then staked the yield of 1.3 million SUI through 0xbe90d into Binance.

In a similar vein, Korean media also revealed that 95 million SUI tokens were indirectly transferred to Upbit through Binance, OKX, and Bithumb.

Researcher defioasis.eth also compiled all related addresses in this incident on Twitter.

Sui Foundation Responds to Selling Incident, Points Fingers at Partners

Subsequently, the Sui Foundation also responded to the entire incident on Twitter, stating:

1. During this period, no insiders, foundation, or Mysten Labs employees, including the founder of Mysten Labs or investors, sold $400 million worth of tokens. Insiders did not engage in any selling or violate lock-up periods and circulating supply plans.

2. While the poster did not provide wallet addresses, we believe the wallets may be held by infrastructure partners who hold tokens under lock-up programs. All token locks are executed by qualified custodians and continuously monitored by the Sui Foundation. These partners are compliant.

The author believes that selling tokens, whether in traditional finance or cryptocurrency, is reasonable as long as it is done in compliance. However, cryptocurrency sales are not legally supervised. Many startup workers are paid not in fiat currency but in tokens/stocks. Just like Huang Renxun, Musk, and the Ethereum Foundation have sold coins multiple times, it's just important to note that we often consider these insiders to have very precise timing when exiting.