Animoca Brands Dispels Claims of Introducing a Solana-Based Token as Speculations Mount Following a Recent Hack

Amid the recent market euphoria and the holiday cheer, bad actors are looking to take advantage to rob unsuspecting crypto users of their hard-earned assets.

Crypto venture capital firm Animoca Brands has dispelled claims that it is introducing a Solana-based token, following speculations that emerged after a recent hack.

On Thursday, December 26, Animoca Brands took to X to warn its followers that it is not launching any official token or Non-Fungible Token (NFT). The firm highlighted this in a bid to disavow a now-deleted pinned post from its chairman, Yat Siu.

The deleted post claimed that Animoca Brands was collaborating with Pump.fun to launch a token with the ticker MOCA on Solana, sharing a link for users to buy the token.

However, according to Animoca Brands, this post came from a hacker who had managed to compromise Siu’s X account. The firm noted that it would release an update after recovering the account.

The exploit comes amid recent excitement around Moca Network, which also uses the MOCA ticker. Notably, Moca Network is a decentralized interoperable ecosystem built on Layer Zero and backed by Animoca Brands. Over the past seven days, MOCA, the native token of this ecosystem, has surged 142%.

Meanwhile, Animoca Brands has yet to offer information about how Siu suffered the hack, but prominent crypto sleuth ZachXBT has argued that the firm’s co-founder likely fell victim to a phishing email scam.

According to ZachXBT, a hacker has stolen approximately $500,000 in the past month from 15 other similar exploits, including The Arena and Brett.

In each of these exploits, the hacker impersonates the X team to warn of a non-existent copyright infringement and tricks unsuspecting users into following a phishing link to enter their password or two-factor authentication code. Once they obtain these details, they launch meme coin scams using the X account.

This recent exploit is another instance highlighting the need for greater security consciousness among founders and projects in the crypto space. As ZachXBT highlights, Siu could have prevented the hack if he had used a hardware security key.