Binance Wallet Owns Almost 50% Of Axie Infinity's SLP Tokens

A single address was found to own more than 22 billion tokens of Axie Infinity's in-game cryptocurrency Smooth Love Potion (SLP) and after a lot of speculations, it was revealed that the address belonged to Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange.

The whale address, a crypto address holding huge quantities of tokens and capable of manipulating prices, was first noticed by Axie Infinity player Michael Benko, who is also the community manager of the theater group Beijing Improv, on Aug. 25.

Benko noted the wallet had accumulated a significant amount of SLP tokens in a negligible amount of time and that this could potentially ruin the Axie Infinity game.

"The significance of a wallet holding so much SLP, if it's an individual person, gives that person a huge amount of control over an economy, especially in an economy where it's so hard to mint a token," Benko told CoinTelegraph.

Interestingly, Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff Zirlin confirmed the whale address that was holding close to 50% of the total supply of SLP tokens belonged to Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange. Zirlin added that the address is a "Binance Ronin gateway contract."

Aleksander Larson, co-founder and chief operating officer of Sky Mavis, a firm focused on building blockchain platforms, had earlier confirmed to CoinTelegraph that the address did not belong to Axie Infinity or Sky Mavis.

"Let's move on — thank you guys for helping to clear up the information around this. It is indeed the Binance Ronin gateway contract," Zirlin said.

The Axie Infinity co-founder added that he reached out to Sky Mavis to talk about the whale wallet but wasn't successful.

"There were some pretty aggressive key opinion leaders [...] who went after me on Twitter today, but I'm really proud of my initial story [...]. I also think having Sky Mavis officially comment to explain to the community what this wallet is, is valuable. Now they have," said Benko.