MOVE Sees Slight Relief in Wider Market Rally, Despite Ongoing Controversy

The Movement project continues to face turbulence this week. After the Ethereum Layer 2 project ousted its cofounder yesterday, May 7, Binance announced the delay of a planned airdrop.

Citing “ongoing developments related to the Movement project” Binance said in an announcement that it was postponing the airdrop “until further clarity is provided.”

An airdrop had been scheduled for approximately six months after Binance’s initial listing of MOVE on Dec. 9. The leading crypto exchange had planned to distribute 5% of the total MOVE supply to its users.

MOVE is down 48% over the past 30 days, as details of the scandal continue to unfold. The token is up just over 4.5% on the day, alongside a wider market upswing today, fueled by positive macro sentiment.

Movement has had an especially chaotic past week after reports surfaced of an undisclosed market making deal potentially involving its cofounder Rushi Manche, who was suspended last week as details of the deal came to light.

Just before the Binance news yesterday, the project announced on its official X account that it had “terminated” Manche, and promised that “Details on leadership changes and a revamped governance structure will be coming soon.” Less than an hour later, the official Movement X account announced that the project, which Manche co-founded with Cooper Scanlon, had rebranded to Move Industries, featuring new leadership, plus a new X account and website.

The rebranded company will be led by founding Movement Labs employees Torab Torabi as CEO and ecosystem architect, alongside Will Gaines as president and CMO.

“Why form a new company? In light of recent news, we needed a clean break,” Movement’s new leadership said on X. “Movement started with the community and our builders. We're returning to our roots.“

Trouble piles on

Manche’s downfall came as the result of a loan deal involving MOVE and a market making scandal, the details of which are still under investigation.

According to CoinDesk, accounts linked with investment platform Web3Port sold 66 million MOVE tokens on Binance the day after Movement’s Dec. 9 token generation event. In March, Binance announced that it had banned the market maker in question, though the exchange did not reveal the name of the firm or associated market makers.

Binance also froze the 38 million USDT profits from the sale and returned it to Movement Labs, which announced plans to use it to buy back MOVE tokens over three months, to “return USDT liquidity into the Move ecosystem.”

The price of MOVE took another hit last week after reports surfaced with the details of a deal involving the Movement Foundation and a firm called Rentech, which the Foundation says it thought was a subsidiary of Web3Port. The terms of the deal reportedly gave Web3Port the right to sell tokens under certain conditions. Movement has hired a third-party firm to investigate whether or not the project was duped in the deal.

Meanwhile, the day after CoinDesk reported on the deal details, Coinbase announced plans to halt trading of MOVE as of May 15, saying it failed to meet their listing standards. The price of MOVE dropped sharply on the news.

In March, Movement launched its Public Mainnet Beta, with $223 million in total value locked to seed DeFi activities. Scanlon told The Defiant at the time that securing that level of day-one funding was “a clear validation of the market's confidence in Movement.”