AVAX Soars After Avalanche Founder Denies ‘Gangster Style’ Litigation Claims
The price of Avalanche’s native token AVAX soared in the market today, after Emin Gün Sirer, Founder of Avalanche developer Ava Labs, called claims that he has used litigation to fool regulators and harm competitors “categorically false.”
As of 09:10 UTC on Tuesday, AVAX stood at USD 20.29, up 13% for the past 24 hours. The strong gains made the token today’s top performer among the top 20 cryptoassets by market capitalization. However, the token still remains down by just over 10% on a 7-day basis.
AVAX price last 7 days:
The gains came after Ava Labs founder Sirer called claims made against his firm “an obvious fraud,” and said he is “disheartened to see people in the crypto space pay any attention to such obvious nonsense.”
“These claims evidently came about when Kyle Roche, a lawyer at a firm we retained in the early days of our company, tried to impress a potential business partner by making false claims about the nature of his work for Ava Labs,” Sirer said.
He added Roche represents only “one of more than a dozen” law firms employed by Ava Labs for matters ranging from tax to human resources and regulatory affairs.
The statement came in response to a report from Crypto Leaks, a website that claims that it is dedicated to exposing corruption and wrongdoing in the crypto space. According to the report, Ava Labs has used the US law firm Roche Freedman and its founding partner Kyle Roche to “attack and harm crypto organizations and projects that might compete with Ava Labs or Avalanche” in a fashion described as “gangster style.”
The allegations made by Crypto Leaks were first published on August 26, and led to a drop in the price of AVAX of more than 20% over a three-day period. The token then started to recover as Sirer released his statement on Monday this week, after hitting a low of USD 17.48.
The statement from the Ava Labs founder came shortly after Kyle Roche himself also published a response to the allegations. According to Roche, the videos of him in the report were “obtained through deceptive means, including a deliberate scheme to intoxicate, and then exploit me, using leading questions.”
“The statements are highly edited and spliced out of context,” the lawyer added.
The latest statement from Sirer came after he on Sunday first addressed the allegations made in the Crypto Leaks report, calling them “conspiracy theory nonsense.”
“We would never engage in the unlawful, unethical and just plain wrong behavior claimed in these self-serving videos,” Sirer added back then.
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