Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli’s recently-launched crypto token tanked 90% on Friday, Aug. 13, 2022, data from crypto exchange Binance shows.
The drop in price to fractions of a penny appeared to correlate with Etherscan data revealing a massive dump from a wallet suspected of being Shkreli’s through its Ethereum Name Server address. The pseudonymous nature of the blockchain makes it difficult to identify with certainty that the address belongs to Shkreli.
150 million MSI drained from 0xshkreli.eth
An alleged hacker apparently drained wallet address 0xshkreli.eth of over 150 million MSI, the native token of Shkreli’s Web 3 initiative, to an anonymous wallet Friday, Aug. 12, 2022. The allegation came from a discord account apparently belonging to Shkreli. By late Friday afternoon, the token’s value had dropped 90% from $0.00001442 to $0.000000957859, data from Coingecko shows. The token reached an all-time high of $0.00003431 on July 26, 2022.
Following his release, the former pharmaceutical executive had plans to launch Druglike, a new Web 3 initiative, to support early-stage drug discovery. In late July, the company announced a decentralized cloud-computing platform offering drug identification and design services of the same standard employed by large pharmaceutical companies. Contributors to the platform would receive rewards in a newly-minted cryptocurrency Martin Shkreli Inu. Shkreli also launched a decentralized exchange in June 2022.
Shkreli told the Daily Mail that the initiative was to stick it to big pharma. It would be great, Shkreli opined, if the next drug breakthrough resulted from volunteers using his new decentralized service instead of being channeled through a pharma giant like Merck.
Two attorneys general from North Carolina and New York are investigating whether the new venture violates a ruling by a federal judge, banning Shkreli for life from participating in the pharmaceutical industry.
Shkreli was once called ‘most hated man in America’
In Sep. 2015, Shkreli was heavily criticized for raising the price of Daraprim, an antiparasitic drug for which his company Turing Pharmaceuticals had acquired the license. Dubbed by the BBC as the “most hated man in America,” he subsequently defended the company’s price hike, citing the need to stay in business.
In 2017, Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison after being convicted of two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. He was released early in May 2022 after serving time at a minimum security prison in Pennsylvania.
A spokesperson for Shkreli declined to comment on the alleged hack.
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