Martin Shkreli’s Druglike DAO Crypto Token Crashes After Alleged Hack
Former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli’s recently launched crypto token fell 90% on Friday 13 August 2022, data from the crypto exchange Binance shows.
The price drop to fractions of a penny appeared to correlate with Etherscan data revealing a massive dump from a wallet suspected to be Shkreli’s through the 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 siphoned the wallet address 0xshkreli.eth of over 150 million MSI, the original token of Shkreli’s Web 3 initiative, to an anonymous wallet on Friday 12 August 2022. The claim came from a discord account apparently belonging to Shkreli. By late Friday afternoon, the token’s value had fallen 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.
After 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 that offers drug identification and design services of the same standard used by large pharmaceutical companies. Contributors to the platform will receive rewards in a newly created cryptocurrency Martin Shkreli Inu. Shkreli also launched a decentralized exchange in June 2022.
Shkreli told the Daily Mail that the initiative was to keep it to big pharma. It would be great, Shkreli thought, if the next drug breakthrough came from volunteers using his new decentralized service rather than being channeled through a pharmaceutical giant like Merck.
Two attorneys general from North Carolina and New York are investigating whether the new venture violates an order by a federal judge, which bans Shkreli for life from participating in the pharmaceutical industry.
Shkreli was once called “the most hated man in America”
In September 2015, Shkreli was heavily criticized for raising the price of Daraprim, an antiparasitic drug that his company Turing Pharmaceuticals had licensed. Dubbed by the BBC as the “most hated man in America”, he subsequently defended the company’s price increase, 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 in early May 2022 after serving time in a minimum security prison in Pennsylvania.
A spokesperson for Shkreli declined to comment on the alleged hack.
For Be[In]Crypto’s Latest Bitcoin (BTC) Analysis, click here.
Disclaimer
All information on our website is published in good faith and for general information purposes only. Any action the reader takes on the information contained on our website is strictly at their own risk.
