On January 15th, the Polygon Foundation transferred 400 million MATIC (approximately $340 million at the time of writing) to the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. These funds, intended for the community, were discovered by ChainArgos researchers.

According to Polygon's tokenomics, the foundation was supposed to allocate 1.2 billion MATIC (12% of the total supply) for staking rewards. However, only 800 million MATIC were sent to the corresponding smart contract. The remaining 400 million MATIC were transferred to an address associated with Binance, and then 300 million of them were sent to an unidentified wallet that had previously received 467 million MATIC from 'Matic: Marketing & Ecosystem.' All of these funds ended up on other Binance exchange wallets.

ChainArgos identified several smart contracts managing the movement of assets directly owned by the Polygon Foundation, allowing the foundation to control almost all of Polygon's financial flows. This started in June 2020 when the corresponding contract was deployed. The volume of funds in the contract gradually increased from zero to 800 million MATIC, even though the tokenomics originally indicated there should have been 400 million tokens, with the total reaching 1.2 billion.

Analysts speculate that the Polygon team and Binance are collaborating to transfer these tokens, which could have caused sharp fluctuations in MATIC's prices. In November 2023, CoinDesk also discovered a connection between Polygon and the sports betting company DraftKings, which had long been a validator for the network and charged a 100% commission for staking.