On the afternoon of January 29th, Binance Labs suddenly tweeted that they had never invested in the 3A game platform SkyArk Chronicles, sparking community discussions. Previously, SkyArk had announced on X platform on January 12th that they had completed a $15 million financing round, with Binance Labs leading the investment. However, in today's tweet, Binance Labs wrote that "SkyArk Chronicles is a project incubated and invested by Binance Labs in the third phase of the Binance Labs incubator in 2021; Binance Labs did not participate in the latest round of financing announced by the project this year." This has left many users who participated in the SkyArk IPO confused.

Later, Web3 data analysis company 0xScope released a tweet, pointing out that SkyArk Chronicles announced false Binance Labs lead investment of 15 million yuan on January 12th, and completed the minting of 50,928 ETH (approximately US$115 million) worth of NFT on January 26th, and upgraded the NFT contract on January 28th.

During the escalation of the incident, Binance co-founder He Yi claimed that although she has a LinkedIn account, she has long forgotten her password and is not responsible for discussing potential listings with project parties. She also warned community users to be wary of those who claim to have a close relationship with her and discuss investment or listing issues. There is a potential implication that SkyArk Chronicles has no financial relationship with Binance.

Three hours after the denial was issued, Binance Labs released another article stating that the financing news of SkyArk Chronicles was disclosed without their knowledge. Binance Labs mentioned that under normal circumstances, the project party would communicate with the investment institution and confirm the release content before conducting public relations activities. However, SkyArk Chronicles did not inform Binance Labs that they had successfully raised $15 million before releasing the public relations statement, nor did they mention that Binance Labs was the lead investor. "After the SkyArk Chronicles team released the public relations statement, Binance Labs contacted the project party and requested the deletion or correction of relevant information. However, SkyArk Chronicles only deleted the relevant content on Twitter and did not clarify the facts. Therefore, Binance Labs decided to unilaterally clarify the investment situation."

Regarding the clarification and denial from Binance Labs, the cryptocurrency community immediately began a "human flesh search" on the SkyArk team, and even dug up founder Kelvin_Chua_0x's experience of rushing to China two years ago.

Other than that, what has sparked heated discussions in the community is the SkyArk Chronicles official website's suspected "Taiwan independence" interface, where the SkyArk project team has listed China and Taiwan separately under the "OUR OFFICES" section.

Source: Community Screenshot

Currently, the community has raised concerns about the security of the contract address for SkyArk Chronicles, and many voices have expressed a desire for SkyArk to open a refund channel. Previously, SkyArk had opened an ETH deposit auction for NFT activities.

This previous NFT sale exceeded 50,000 ETH

Two weeks after releasing financing information on January 12th, the deposit amount of SkyArk's Genesis NFT sales contract address achieved exponential growth, from 3,700 ETH on January 26th to over 10,000 ETH on January 27th, and the ETH deposit amount on January 28th directly exceeded 40,000 ETH.

"Binance Leads Investment", "15 million". It can be said that SkyArk's ability to raise a large amount of ETH in such a short period of time is due to the expectation from Binance. However, this expectation was officially identified as false news by Binance Labs.

This undoubtedly sparked community discussions. SkyArk founder held an AMA to explain that "there was indeed a $15 million financing, which involved multiple rounds of financing for coin rights and equity. Only one round of coin rights financing has been conducted, in which Binance Labs participated and held the largest share. Binance Labs may have misunderstood that SkyArk conducted another round of coin rights financing."

Although SkyArk explained that trying to "shift the blame" was a misunderstanding by Binance Labs, Kay Capital stated that "the SkyArk project team should handle the associated issues well, such as providing the option for independent selection of direct refunds and not participating in the lottery. Otherwise, retail investors will suffer greatly, and the project will face difficulties after launching."

Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:

Telegram Subscription Group: https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram Discussion Group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Official Twitter Account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia