🧐 Moving on

Scrutiny arises after Movement's market maker controversy

Author

Katherine Ross
March 26, 2025

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GameStop’s taking a page out of Strategy’s book. 

The struggling video game retailer will add bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset, something my old colleague Jim Cramer previously pushed for… though I’m not so sure CEO Ryan Cohen’s thrilled about that one. 

While GameStop’s got a lot of retail support on the stock side, the business still isn’t doing too hot. Maybe crypto… or just bitcoin… changes that. 

Elsewhere:

  • Bitcoin’s still holding on to $87,942, a 0.7% increase over the last day. ETH’s up over $2,067.

  • Open interest fell to 146,560 BTC, meaning that CME traders aren’t yet ready to join the rally, per K33.

  • DEX volume is down 8% in the past 24 hours to $6.39 billion, according to Blockworks Research.

😅 Making a move

One of the biggest upsides to crypto is the potential transparency involved in being able to track onchain data and see what’s actually happening. A perk in comparison to, say, the traditional banking system. 

The problem, however, is that some transparency isn’t full transparency. 

Yesterday, Binance announced that they had offboarded the market maker behind MOVE, the Movement Labs token, after an investigation found that the unnamed market maker sold 66 million tokens “with little buy orders” back on Dec. 12, scoring a $38 million USDT profit. 

After freezing the accounts of the market maker, Binance and the Movement team were able to claw back the funds and in return, Movement said it’ll buy back $38 million of MOVE. 

But the thing is: While the statement from Movement promises “transparency,” the firm hasn’t disclosed who the market maker is. 

After multiple requests for clarification, a spokesperson for Movement Labs told me yesterday that “due to advice from the legal team,” Movement had no further comment. Binance and Web3Port also didn’t respond to my requests for comments. 

The market maker, Binance said in the announcement, was tied to another market maker from a separate investigation into GoPlus Security and MyShell. Both were “offboarded” by the exchange.

An examination of Web3Port’s X account history shows prior engagement with posts from Movement Labs. Though, as of this morning, it appears that at least one repost of a Movement Labs post has been quietly removed. 

The repost in question

According to its website, Web3Port Labs “provides comprehensive full-cycle acceleration and investment support for Web3 projects at all stages. With our primary market investment fund and secondary market liquidity fund, we facilitate the complete lifecycle of startups, including investment, financing, management and exit, through a one-stop Web3 accelerator platform.”

I’ve been told that teams will bring Web3Port on to exit, which is no secret, as evident by the language on the team’s own website. 

Mike Dudas of 6th Man Ventures also said it was “clear” that Web3Port wasn’t a real market maker. 

The long-running discourse around Movement Labs began before its token launch late last year, with user @0xSisyphus sharing a screenshot of what was allegedly a MOVE key opinion leader document. In response, Movement’s Rushi Manche said that it came from a marketing agency the firm had “cut off” a year ago.

Then there are the potential ties to World Liberty Financial’s token swap deals, as previously reported by Blockworks. Movement, at the time, told Blockworks that it had not engaged with WLFI or purchased any tokens.

Eric Conor pointed out the timing of WLFI buying MOVE, which happened right before a news headline about Elon Musk’s DOGE showing interest in Movement. However, Manche denied any insider trading allegations at the time.

Other allegations, such as angel investors knowing Movement Labs was a “pump and dump,” have propagated on Crypto Twitter. X account Fede Intern also publicly warned builders away from Movement Labs last month. 

The firm also faces an $18.4 million lawsuit filed in December by the former head of financial relations at the IOTA Foundation, Daniel Simerman, who alleges breach of contract.

According to the complaint, co-founder Rushi Manche and Cooper Scanlon met with Simerman in April of 2023 to “discuss how to obtain funding for their business, how to optimize their product offering, how to manage and grow blockchain organizations at this scale, and the engagement of plaintiff’s services on a compensated basis.”

Disclosure: Empire podcast host and Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz is an angel investor in Movement Labs.

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  • Polymarket suffered a governance attack, though there (thankfully) weren’t big wins or losses. Just a guy with an ETH address attacking the outcome of a Ukrainian-themed market. 

  • SEC chair nominee Paul Atkins disclosed around $6 million in “crypto-related assets” but no bitcoin. Sad.  

  • Fidelity’s planning to make a push into the stablecoin market, according to a report from the Financial Times.

☹️ Lacking fundamentals

If you thought we were done talking about the Digital Asset Summit, think again!

This morning, we got an extra episode of the Empire podcast, which is a conversation between Yanowitz and Eric Peters of Coinbase Asset Management and CEO of One River.

Yanowitz picked Peters’ brain about the four-year cycle (he doesn’t think there is one on a forward-looking basis) and, of course, fundamentals. 

Here’s a tough pill to swallow: Despite all of our hopes and dreams for a more fundamental-based crypto, Peters isn’t so sold. 

“I suspect it’s going to be narrative-driven for a while. There are just a lot of people that need to buy these assets, and — unless they're just gonna dismiss them outright — they need to get a position on, and … this next wave is gonna be driven by investment committees, at least from an institutional perspective,” he said. 

“A lot of things are starting to be built on Ethereum and Wall Street seems to be more engaged. I keep hearing more about tokenization and ‘oh my God, we actually own nothing.’ Nothing is the wrong number … That doesn't sound super fundamental. I mean, at a very high-level macro argument, I think it is fundamental,” he added, but it’s not like the TradFi firms are “building a discounted cash flow for Raydium,” to Yanowitz’s point. 

None of this is to discount fundamentals, which — as we’ve talked about — will still become more important as the industry matures. 

But perhaps we have to pump the brakes on getting too excited about shifting away from narratives just yet.

It’s a builders market. It will always be a builders market. 

Permissionless IV is for the ones deep in the code — building infra, launching new systems, and reshaping how this space runs.

🎤 Speaker apps are open — got something that matters? Say it on stage.

💻 Hackathon is live — $100K+ in bounties. Builders get in free.

June 22–26 | Brooklyn

On our minds: Transparency

The thing about transparency is that it implies responsibility.

Public companies file all sorts of disclosures with the SEC because the company itself is required to do so by securities law. 

But who is responsible for disclosing, say, how crypto raised in a public token sale is being managed?

Perhaps it’s the company that built the software. Or the offshore foundation that governs the project’s development.

In both cases, that would suggest either entity wields influence over the value of its token — with investors looking for a signal on whether the protocol’s treasury is being appropriately handled. Which feels too much like something the issuer of a security would do.

Fingers crossed, the more agreeable SEC has minimized this effect.

My theme of the day, it seems. 

Look, as a journalist, I’d be remiss not to push for transparency. But I genuinely think that while crypto has so much potential, it really misses the mark here. 

Sure, we get a lot of information handed to us, thanks to onchain data and supersleuths like ZachXBT. But a lot of backdoor dealings and conversations never see the light of day. 

You’d think, as a crypto journalist, I’d have a bit more access to information, but — in an effort to be fully transparent — covering Wall Street was easier at times. At least the rules of the games were always established. 

That’s okay, though. I’m up for a challenge. 

And, if you have anything you want to be transparent about, you know where to find me.