ZachXBT Names Axiom Employee in Solana Insider Trading Investigation
On February 26, 2026, on-chain investigator ZachXBT published a detailed investigation naming Axiom, a trading platform built on Solana, as the center of an insider trading scheme run by its own staff. The report identifies Broox Bauer, known on X as @WheresBroox, a senior business development employee based in New York, as one of multiple Axiom staff who allegedly abused a lack of access controls on internal tools to look up sensitive user data.
Axiom was founded in 2024 by Henry Zhang and Preston Ellis, known to the crypto community by the aliases “Mist” and “Cal.” Both are UC San Diego graduates in their early twenties with no prior startup experience, previously employed at TikTok and DoorDash, who built Axiom into a browser-based Solana trading terminal after going through Y Combinator’s Winter 2025 batch. The platform reportedly hit $100 million in revenue within four months of its early-2025 launch and grew from roughly 2% to 72% market share in under a year, according to Dune Analytics data, making it one of the fastest-growing companies in Y Combinator’s history. ZachXBT’s report puts its total revenue to date above $390 million.
According to the investigation, Bauer described his own access in a recorded clip: he claimed he could track any Axiom user by referral code, wallet address, or user ID, and could “find out anything to do with that person.” Screenshots cited in the report show him pulling up internal dashboard views of private wallet data for at least two traders, referred to as “Jerry” and “Monix,” in April and August of 2025.
Bauer and a small group of associates allegedly compiled this kind of access into shared spreadsheets built specifically to monitor wallets tied to well-known crypto influencers, giving the group early visibility into what those wallets were buying before the trades became public knowledge. The scheme reportedly ran from early 2025 through a recorded February 2026 call, in which Bauer outlined a plan to help a newly hired moderator, referred to in the investigation as “Gowno,” generate $200,000 quickly using the access. Separate reporting on trading activity tied to the probe put the group’s combined gains above $1 million. ZachXBT’s team traced Bauer’s main wallet through messages sent in a private chat, then mapped out the related addresses from there.
Axiom responded directly to the allegations: “We are shocked and disappointed to hear that someone on our team abused internal customer support tools to look up user wallets.” The platform said it has cut off the access in question and opened its own internal investigation, though no confirmed regulatory action, from the SEC or otherwise, has been reported at this stage.
The case lands as more than an isolated staffing failure. ZachXBT has spent recent days pointing at a broader category of platforms — centralized exchanges, memecoin launchpads, stablecoin issuers, prediction markets — that sit at the intersection of order flow and sensitive customer data, arguing the same structural risk exists at any of them regardless of intent. Prediction markets like Polymarket saw active betting on which company would eventually be named before Axiom was confirmed, and some bettors on that very market were later accused of trading on advance knowledge of the reveal itself.
The allegation carries weight in large part because of who is making it. Since 2021, ZachXBT has been credited with tracing the record $1.5 billion Bybit hack, uncovering a $243 million theft from a Genesis creditor, and connecting the wallets behind the Bored Bunny rug pull, building a reputation as one of the few independent investigators trusted enough to work directly with law enforcement. He has also weathered pushback: a defamation suit filed after one of his earlier exposes was dropped after the crypto community crowdfunded over $1 million for his legal defense.
What the Axiom case exposes isn’t a hack or an exploit; it’s a governance gap. Any platform holding granular wallet-to-identity mapping for its users is sitting on a tool that can be turned into a trading edge the moment someone with access decides to use it that way — and Axiom is unlikely to be the last platform where that gap gets found the hard way.
Curious how investigators like ZachXBT trace wallets and connect on-chain activity to real identities? Explore more in our Bitcoin Academy.