Departed Evmos co-founder sells thousands of tokens, the team claims

The Evmos team alleged that co-founder Akash Khosla has been unloading substantial quantities of the project’s native token since his departure.

Khosla is reportedly attempting to divest himself of half a million tokens, worth $70,000, through Osmosis, a decentralized exchange within the Cosmos ecosystem, according to a thread by Evmos on Twitter.

“We are aware of the departed co-founder who owns the 34M wallet and has been attempting to sell 500k EVMOS on Osmosis,” the team said.

It’s worth noting that Khosla was originally allotted 34 million Evmos tokens ($4.7 million) on a four-year vesting schedule. This allocation means that Khosla continues to receive newly vested tokens into his assigned address over this period.

Evmos is a Cosmos-backed blockchain that supports the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). While Evmos is based on the Cosmos software stack, it is also compatible with Ethereum apps. Last year, the team raised $27 million in a token fundraising round led by Polychain Capital. Its development is currently led by the other co-founder Federico Kunze Küllmer.

Khosla has sold 144,000 tokens so far, valued at $40,000 at the time of sale, according to on-chain findings from Jessica Huhnke, a web3 data analyst and engineer at Flipside Crypto. This accounts for a mere 1.5% of the total Evmos sold since April 30. In contrast, other users have sold a combined total of around 9 million tokens, Huhnke found.

Disagreements over accountability

Nevertheless, Khosla’s sell-offs coincided with a sharp decrease in Evmos’ token price. Its value has nosedived by more than 50% this May, falling from $0.30 at the beginning of the month to now $0.14. 

Evmos Price Chart | Source: CoinGecko

Khosla left the project due to “operational misalignment and disagreements over accountability,” the Evmos team stated. They claim to be actively working with Khosla to transfer the tokens back to the Evmos Foundation rather than seeing them sold on decentralized exchanges. Evmos also shared Khosla’s GitHub contributions to the project.

Khosla's wallet remains the largest delegator on the Evmos' network and has staked 11.5 million ($1.6 million) tokens, the Evmos team said. When contacted, Khosla said he was “outraged” about the assertions from the Evmos team.

“I’m deeply disappointed and outraged at the misleading assertions that have wrongly portrayed me as being anything but loyal to the Evmos project and community. I’ve dedicated the last two years of my life to Evmos, and I would never do anything to jeopardize the integrity of the project and the community’s trust," Khosla stated in a comment shared with The Block. "While I explore all available options that would yield the best possible outcome for the Evmos community, I look forward to sharing more soon.” 

This story has been updated with a comment from Akash Khosla.