Emin Gün Sirer, the founder of Avalanche, said that the claims, which caused the AVAX token to drop by about 11%, are “categorically false.”
Emin Gün Sirer has said that recent claims that his company, Ava Labs, was involved in a campaign to smear competitors of Avalanche, the company’s $5 billion layer 1 blockchain, are “categorically false.”
“These claims seem to have started when Kyle Roche, a lawyer at a firm we hired when our company was young, tried to impress a potential business partner by lying about what he did for Ava Labs,” Gün Sirer said in a statement Monday.
Gün Sirer spoke after a whistleblower site called Crypto Leaks said on August 26 that Ava Labs executives paid law firm Roche Freeman to smear competitors with class-action lawsuits that would make crypto regulators like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission look at them more closely (SEC). The accusations caused Avalanche’s AVAX token to drop by about 11%, but it has since gotten back some of its value. CoinMarketCap.com says that AVAX is the 16th largest cryptocurrency by market value.
Gün Sirer, a former professor at Cornell University who now runs a blockchain business, wrote that he was “disappointed” by how the cryptocurrency community reacted to the news, which he called “obvious nonsense.”
Gün Sirer says that Avalanche does not trust Roche with its legal matters, and that Avalanche did not tell Roche to file any lawsuits against other projects, like a class-action lawsuit against Solana Labs in July, which is the team behind the multi-billion-dollar Solana blockchain. The lawsuit said that Solana’s SOL token is an unregistered security whose investors made money at the expense of regular buyers.
“For example, we didn’t know about the Solana lawsuit until we read about it in the news. We were furious that he was suing another project, and we tried to get him to drop the suit,” Gün Sirer wrote.
Gün Sirer says that Roche has only handled a few “minor” legal cases about Avalanche.
In his own statement, Roche said that his law firm, Roche Freeman, and Ava Labs do not have a “secret pact.”
