Blockchain practitioner ZachXBT wrote on Sunday that the team behind RaveDAO is at least aware of who manipulated the price of its token, which saw an impossible 11,000% increase in price followed by an almost immediate collapse.
“I found suspicious CEX (centralized crypto exchange) activity on April 26 linked to RaveDAO team addresses on chain, potentially contradicting their recent statements,” the blockchain investigator said.
In a separate post, ZachXBT flagged a transfer from a RAVE address used for “initial distribution” of RaveDAO, from which $23 million worth of tokens were transferred to two Bitget deposit addresses, causing the price to drop 40% from $1 to $0.6.
RaveDAO posted a six-part X thread on Saturday, previously reported by CoinDesk, in which “we are aware of the rumors and allegations circulating regarding $RAVE and the RaveDAO team. We want to be clear: the RaveDAO team is not involved in, nor responsible for, recent price action.”
However, ZachXBT said, “given the concentration of supply, at a minimum, the team knows who is responsible for this price action.”
In a separate X post, the investigator said, “you expect the community to believe that RAVE organically went $60M -> $6B mkt cap in nine days with little to no benefit? Given that your team handled the initial distribution with a low float, it’s unlikely that you don’t know the party responsible for it.”
The RaveDAO token, which rose nearly 11,000% in nine days from around $0.25 to $27.33, then fell by over 90%, losing around $5.7 billion in market capitalization in just 48 hours. Its price is currently around $0.67.
The mirror-turner also said that RAVE is not the only sign of manipulation “we’ve seen on large centralized exchanges. It’s just the most obvious.” He also said that it was highly unlikely that the CEXs did not detect the massive $RAVE token price movements.
