The blockchain project Skycoin, which touts itself as the “the new internet for the new world”, saw a major sell-off over the past two weeks after an insider trading and a series of scandals were exposed.

According to an official announcement post on June 18, Skycoin confirmed that it has terminated partnership with its Chinese marketing arm, known as EVOLAB, as the marketing team was involved into an embezzlement and robbery of skycoin tokens which directly led to the recent sharp drop in the price of skycoin.

“The trigger for the events was the discovery that the previous Skycoin China marketing team (EVOLAB) had embezzled approximately 100,000 skycoins over the course of the past half year. In light of this discovery and their failure to return or account for the embezzled coins, the relationship with this team was terminated.” The post reads.

But what stunned the community is the following farce. At 9:30 on June 13, 9 individuals including and led by the marketing team members Sam Sing Fong, Mary Li, Xiangdong Yan and Jesse Sun Fei broke into Skycoin founder Synth’s home in London and took him and his wife hostage for six hours,over the course of which were threatened, beat and robbed. Moreover,   the gang extracted 18.88 bitcoins and 6466 skycoins during the robbery.

The statement also claims that the robbers tried but failed to steal the design framework for the Skycoin ecosystem.

In order to prevent embezzled and stolen funds from being dumped the market, Skycoin has asked the primary exchanges to freeze the accounts of the criminal suspect. But the total number of skycoins stolen by these individuals is still being determined, and the addresses containing stolen coins are also being documented. And the skycoin legal team will supply an update on the aftermath of the armed robbery at a later time.

It’s noteworthy that a Shanghai-based blockchain startup, ShellPay,is also involved in this scandal. Skycoin is the first token supported by the skyledge platform which is launched by ShellPay.

Two of the robbers, Mary Li and Jesse Sun Fei, are former employees of ShellPay, but they are still the company’s shareholders. Zhang Hong, the chairman of ShellPay, said after the robbery that “I have fired Li and Sun, but they didi not withdraw shares. They themselves are thieves and rogues. And ShellPay staff rushed to rescue Synth shortly after the robbery incident, and helped him move to a safe place. ”

Skycoin, developed by early contributors to both Bitcoin and Ethereum, aims to fulfill Satoshi’s original vision of creating a new and decentralized internet. Skycoin(SKY) are trading around $6.48 USD, and it has lost over 50% of the value over the past week, according to Coinmarketcap.com.