An audio recording. In it, a man named Broox Bauer explains to his "insider trading" group how he uses his backend privileges at Axiom to track any user's on-chain activity. This is not speculation. It is his own voice.
On February 26, on-chain detective ZachXBT posted a blockbuster investigation directly calling out Broox Bauer, a senior business development employee at Axiom, for systematically abusing internal tools to monitor user wallets and execute insider trades since early 2025. And Bauer was not alone.
The Dark Side of a $390M Machine
Axiom is one of the hottest trading platforms on Solana. Founded in 2024 and incubated by Y Combinator, it integrates meme coin scanning, spot trading, perpetuals, and mining. Within four months of launch, platform fee revenue exceeded $100 million; cumulative revenue has since surpassed $390 million, with over 50% market share in the Solana trading bot segment. At its peak, according to Blockworks, Axiom netted $5 million in weekly profit, making it one of the fastest-growing startups in crypto.
But ZachXBT's probe revealed a different side: the platform stored users' wallet lists, nicknames, and linked accounts in a simple backend system with almost no permission segmentation. Business development and customer support staff all had free access. In other words, Axiom never implemented any meaningful monitoring or access control to prevent this kind of abuse.
Audio Evidence: "I Can Find Out Everything About Any User"
In the audio shared by ZachXBT, Broox Bauer personally describes his method. Given a referral code, wallet address, or user ID, he could pull up any user's complete activity log from the Axiom backend. He also detailed a deliberate obfuscation strategy: start with 10–20 wallets, then slowly increase the count, "so it doesn't look suspicious." In another clip, he lays out "ground rules" for queries and says he will send the full wallet list. This is not second-hand rumor; it is a sitting Axiom employee explaining, in his own recorded voice, how he steals user data.
The "Insider Trading" Group and a Google Sheet
The source of the recording is even more shocking. The full audio comes from a private group chat whose name was literally "insider trading." Members actively discussed trading strategies, with Bauer acting as the "intelligence supplier." The group created a Google Sheet aggregating target wallet addresses of several KOLs—addresses sourced from Bauer's Axiom backend access. Their profit model was textbook: find a KOL who buys with a alt account before publicly shilling a token, front-run that buy, then dump after the KOL's shill triggers a retail frenzy. It is a full insider trading pipeline: Axiom backend → Bauer extracts wallet list → Google Sheet consolidates KOL targets → group front-runs → profit.
Not Just a Rogue Employee: Systemic Vulnerability
ZachXBT stressed this is not merely a "bad employee" issue. Axiom's backend had a fundamental design flaw: user wallet lists, nicknames, and linked accounts were all in a single admin interface with zero permission isolation. Multiple employees could easily access sensitive data. From the start, Axiom lacked any effective internal monitoring to prevent abuse. For a platform generating $390 million in revenue and serving hundreds of thousands of active users, this is not an oversight—it is a choice for speed and profit over user safety. Specific issues included: no tiered access for sensitive data; no audit logs for employee queries; multiple staff implicated; and access only removed after ZachXBT's public exposure.
Axiom Responds: "Surprised and Disappointed"
In a brief statement, Axiom said: "We are surprised and disappointed to learn that someone on our team abused internal customer support tools to query user wallets. We have removed access to these tools and will continue investigating, holding violators accountable. This behavior does not represent our team. We are committed to putting users first." The company used the word "surprised"—but when a firm stores all user data in an unprotected backend accessible to any employee, the real surprise is that this was not uncovered sooner.
This is not the first case of platform employees abusing internal access for insider trading. In 2022, Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi was indicted by the DOJ for trading on listing information. OpenSea employee Nathaniel Chastain was convicted for NFT insider trading in 2023. Axiom may not yet face criminal charges, but the pattern is identical: insiders exploiting information asymmetry to front-run retail. This time, ZachXBT laid out audio, screenshots, and a timeline—hard evidence. On Polymarket, a trader under the alias predictorxyz had already bet $65,800 that Axiom would be named in the investigation before the report dropped, walking away with approximately $411,000 in profit. The investigation itself became a market event.