Ava Labs CEO Emin Gün Sirer has rejected a report from CryptoLeaks that makes several strong allegations. The report says that Ava Labs and law firm Roche Freedman struck a deal that saw Ava Labs stock and cryptocurrencies given in return for pursuing actions against crypto companies.
The CEO of Ava Labs, Emin Gün Sirer, has rejected a report from CryptoLeaks that the company had struck a deal with a law firm to actively damage companies in the industry. Sirer called the report “conspiracy theory nonsense” and “inflammatory.”
The CryptoLeaks report talks about Roche Freedman, a law firm that it says “widely sues people in crypto, currently running at least 25 class actions.” It points to cases against Binance, Solana Labs, and Dfinity Foundation. CryptoLeaks did not mince its words, saying that the firm has been “operating according to an extraordinary secret pact that harms the crypto industry, and has a nature so perverse that it undermines the integrity of the American legal system.”
The report alleges that Ava Labs and Roche Freedman made a deal that granted the law firm large amounts of Ava Labs stock and AVAX cryptocurrencies, which are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In return, Roche Freedman agreed to “pursue a hidden purpose.”
CryptoLeaks also included videos and the allegations from the entire investigation are strong, quoted verbatim below. It said that Roche Freeman and Kyle Roche carried out the following,
“[used] the American legal system – gangster style – to attack and harm crypto organizations and projects that might compete with Ava Labs or Avalanche in some way, 2) sue crypto industry actors generally with the aim of creating magnets for regulators such as the SEC and CFTC that distract them from the highly commercial nature of Ava Labs and the Avalanche blockchain, and 3) secretly pursue Emin Gün Sirer’s personal vendettas against individuals.”
Many prominent crypto individuals have responded to the case. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said that he wasn’t sure if the allegations were true and that “of course, #binance was a target.”
BlockTower founder Ari Paul said that it “fits with everything I’ve seen previously from both Sirer and Roche.”
He also noted that while Ava’s lawyers said that Roche’s statements are false. Paul said that he assumed that the report was accurate, and if there was evidence or logic that proved it was false, he would update this view. Until then, he called the report “directionally accurate.”
The price of AVAX has sunk following the report. The token is down 11.3% to $17.69 over the past 24 hours.