Ave Labs allegedly used a law firm to target competition and personal enemies
Crypto Leaks has claimed that Avalanche blockchain developer Ave Labs paid AVAX tokens and equities to law firm Roche Freedman, which filed cases against crypto exchanges like Binance, claiming that they led customers to believe the UST crypto was safe, yet it crashed in May.
The AVAX token price dropped almost 20 per cent since Crypto Leaks reported the matter.
Its market capitalisation also plunged over 10 per cent in the last 24 hours.
In a series of secretly recorded videos published by Crypto Leaks, the founding partner of Roche Freedman, Kyle Roche, can be heard saying that the law firm was paid to promote Ava Labs and ridicule its rivals like Dfinity and Solana.
Roche allegedly appears to assert in the videos that he made a deal with Ava Labs in September 2019 and he was the second person to get Ava Labs stock, after Andreessen Horowitz, an American Venture Capital firm. He reportedly said: "I promised to offer legal services in exchange for a specific portion of the token supply” as part of an agreement finalised in September 2019.
According to Kyle, Ave labs CEO Emin Sirer used the litigation system to eliminate his competition. On July 1, 2022, Roche Freedman LLP filed a high-profile lawsuit against Solana Labs, Solana Foundation, and its co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, alleging that Solana offered unregistered securities to American investors in violation of federal securities laws.
Kyle claims to have used a special tool in the US legal process called “discovery to demand access” to gain access to their confidential accounts, commercial data, email and social media communications. The confidential information shared by Kyle, provided Ava labs a competitive advantage over its rivals.
In another allegation, an unnamed Turkish social media influencer in one of the videos claimed that Ava Labs CEO “was a part of a terrorist organization” and “used the law firm for his vendettas”. It is alleged that Emin made Kyle serve the influencer with a defamation lawsuit after he landed in the US.
Roche Freedman also filed a lawsuit against Dfinity Foundation in the California federal court. The lawsuit alleged that Internet Computer creator, Dfinity, misled its investors into believing that Dfinity could not sell ICP tokens on May 10, 2021, the day the ICP tokens first became tradable on the exchanges, or in the weeks that followed. But apparently, it did sell their ICP tokens.
Reacting to Crypto Leaks report, Emin tweeted: “We would never engage in unlawful, unethical and just plain wrong behaviour”.