AVAX price jumps after Ava Labs founder responded to claims of fooling regulators

The price of AVAX, Avalanche’s native token, has been soaring today after Ava Labs founder, Emin Gün Sirer, said the claims about Ava Labs using litigation to harm competitors and fool regulators were “categorically false.” AVAX price has risen from about $17.72 on Monday (August 29) to trading above $20.20 at press time today. The coin has gained about 14%since yesterday.

Today’s gains have pushed AVAX into the list of today’s top 20 crypto assets performers by market capitalization. However, the token is still 10% lower in the past seven days.

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Ava Labs founder’s response

In a statement released today, Ava Labs founder Sirer terms the claims against his firm “an obvious fraud.” He went ahead to say that he is “disheartened to see people in the crypto space pay any attention to such obvious nonsense.”

Sirer said:

“These claims evidently came about when Kyle Roche, a lawyer at a firm we retained in the early days of our company, tried to impress a potential business partner by making false claims about the nature of his work for Ava Labs.”

Roche was one among other law firms that Ava Labs had employed for issues around tax, human resources, and regulatory affairs.

The claims about using litigation to harm competitors and fool regulators had been made by Crypto Leaks, a website that claims to be dedicated to exposing corruption and wrongdoing within the crypto space. The Crypto Leaks report first published on August 26 claimed that Ava Labs had used the US law firm Roche Freedman to “attack and harm crypto organizations and projects that might compete with Ava Labs or Avalanche.”

The Crypto Leaks report is said to be one of the main reasons why AVAX token between August26 and August 29 (yesterday).

The Ava Labs response is expected to offer clarification to investors and traders and push the price of AVAX above $22, where it was trading before August26.