Three wallets, one denial, and $5.7 billion in market cap gone in 48 hours.
RaveDAO’s $RAVE crashed 90% over 24 hours as crypto exchanges Binance and Bitget opened investigations into the buying and selling exercise that catapulted the token to a $6 billion market cap final week.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen confirmed the probe on X, and Binance co-CEO Richard Teng subsequently stated the alternate was reviewing the matter and would “all the time” do its half to look at indicators of market misconduct. Gate.io was additionally named within the authentic allegations from onchain investigator ZachXBT, who has provided a $25,000 bounty for whistleblowers with proof of the events concerned.
The collapse accelerated after the challenge’s Saturday denial reasonably than stabilizing on it.
RaveDAO posted a six-part X thread stating the group “shouldn’t be engaged in, nor answerable for, current worth motion.”
The thread didn’t handle any of the particular onchain allegations that prompted the scrutiny, together with the focus of roughly 90% of the 1 billion $RAVE provide throughout three Gnosis Protected multi-signature wallets attributed to the group, or the thousands and thousands of tokens transferred to exchanges shortly earlier than the rally started.
The unique rally took $RAVE from about $0.25 to $27.33 in 9 days, a ten,800% transfer that triggered $44 million in liquidations on Friday, simply behind bitcoin and ether, with the majority of them from brief sellers positioned in opposition to the token.
Investigators flagged a “bait and liquidate” sample by which seen token transfers to exchanges steered incoming promote stress, drawing merchants into brief positions earlier than these tokens have been withdrawn and costs ripped larger, forcing shorts to cowl at progressively worse ranges.
RaveDAO presents itself as a Web3 leisure platform providing onchain ticketing for digital music occasions, tracing its origins to a 2023 Istanbul afterparty. The challenge reported about $3 million in 2025 income and lists partnerships with Binance, OKX, Bitget, and Polygon.
RaveDAO’s thread did verify the group plans to “liquidate parts of unlocked tokens” when applicable to fund operations and advertising and marketing, and stated it was “exploring applicable fashions, together with price-triggered or performance-triggered locks, that tie group incentives to ecosystem progress.”
It didn’t decide to any particular lockup mechanism or timeline, nevertheless.
