OKX has announced they have successfully seized a very high number of Tether (USDT) tokens. The exchange has done it in an attempt to put a stop to market manipulation.

As per the officials at the OKX exchange, 2,014,381 USDT stablecoins have been seized so far. As the USDT tokens are pegged with the US dollar, it means that the amount equivalent to $2.014 million has been seized.

OKX Seized Five Accounts

According to the sources, the OKX teams were working hard to catch the accounts that were involved in malicious market manipulation.

It had been reported that the manipulation of the Celestial (CELT) token was being carried out with the help of the USDT tokens.

The OKX teams acted fast and they were able to get their hands on the accounts responsible for the illicit market manipulation.

As communicated by the OKX officials, there were five accounts in total that had been working together to carry out the manipulation of the CELT token.

The exchange has confirmed that they have established the five accounts that are suspected of being involved in the malicious activity.

In addition to that, the exchange has also made an announcement pertaining to the users who suffered due to the manipulation.

To deal with their problem, the exchange has announced a compensation plan. The affected users will be getting a portion of the compensation fund that has been set for $3 million.

The company made the announcement pertaining to the restitution back on February 28, 2023.

Details Shared by OKX about Celestial

OKX has provided information about the manipulation that was carried out by the Celestial developers.

It was on February 26, when the developers of Celestial announced that they had been working on a new game that would be based on blockchain technology.

Right after talking about the game, the developers started to promote the game and launched a campaign for that purpose.

They proceeded with advertising the new game through social media and continued with the process. In the process, they kept using the branding of the OKX exchange.

According to the officials at the OKX exchange, the use of their brand is something that was not authorized at all. As a result of the activities carried out by the Celestial developers, the value of the CELT token went up.

The report shows that the value of the token doubled in just a matter of two days. Afterward, the trading price of the token experienced a 50% dip. The report shows that it was in the past 24-hours that the trading price of the asset plummeted.

Since the decline, the value of the token has reached a lower level and it is currently trading at a low of $0.002129.

Response to Insider Trading Allegations

The officials at the OKX exchange have responded to the allegations made by the customers concerning insider trading activities.

The exchange explained that they had reportedly invested $100,000 through OKX Ventures, their investment subsidiary. The investment was made into the Celestial GameFi project.

The officials confirmed that it was back in September 2021 when the huge investment was made into the gaming project.

They confirmed that they had not kept the CELT tokens for themselves. Instead, they proceeded with depositing the tokens into the accounts that belonged to OKX Ventures.

They did not make any transactions for the particular token and even carried out an investigation to confirm if insider trading was taking place or not.

They did not see any activity involving the allegations of insider trading that were made by the customers. They carried out an all-out investigation to establish and find evidence if something like that had been attempted or not.

They even interrogated all the staff members in their exchange to establish if they were involved in market manipulation. However, none of the members were found guilty of such acts.