On the morning of June 27, the token price $ACX of Across Protocol dropped more than 10% after serious allegations emerged. Accordingly, the project development team was accused of exploiting the DAO governance mechanism to transfer 23 million USD tokens from the community fund to their private company, while also conducting insider trading before ACX was listed on Binance.
Allegations from Ogle and responses from Across Protocol
The initial allegations came from Ogle, the anonymous founder of Glue, claiming that DAO proposals were passed thanks to wallets controlled by the internal team, including a wallet linked to Risk Labs CEO Hart Lambur. These wallets were said to have voted in large volumes without disclosing related financial interests.
Hart Lambur, co-founder #AcrossProtocol and CEO of Risk Labs, strongly rebutted, calling the allegations "completely false" and "baseless." He emphasized that Risk Labs is a non-profit organization, has no shareholders, and receives only a salary of 100,000 USD/year, not having received any token allocations from the DAO for many years. Lambur asserted that wallets like maxodds.eth had been public beforehand and denied selling tokens before listing or selling tokens allocated from the DAO. He stated that these tokens were used properly for project development and committed to providing more transparent content in upcoming DAO proposals.
Tensions escalate and major concerns
The situation escalated as Bryan Pellegrino, founder of LayerZero and Stargate – two direct competitors of Across – also accused Hart Lambur of insider trading by buying ACX just before the unexpected listing on Binance in December 2024. Lambur responded that he was "completely unaware" of the listing plans and did not pay any fees for it, discovering the news through Twitter like everyone else.
The public spat on Twitter (X) turned the incident into a showdown between competitors in the crypto industry. This is not the first time ACX has been accused of price manipulation and insider trading; previously, in October 2024, Bryan Pellegrino also warned about a serious vulnerability in the ACX token contract.
This controversy has raised significant questions in the community about the transparency of DAO operations – a factor that is considered fundamental to Web3. Although the Across Protocol team has completely denied the allegations, investor confidence has been severely affected, as evidenced by the sharp decline in the ACX token (down nearly 10% in the last 24 hours, trading around 0.136 USD). This event also rekindles "dramas" about the role of internal wallets and the oversight of power in decentralized organizations, notably the Movement project with previous controversies over covert agreements. #anhbacong