Apparent victory, undercurrents beneath: The Movement controversy is far from over
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Apparent victory, undercurrents beneath: The Movement controversy is far from over
Fairness and transparency remain the most important cornerstones of the crypto industry.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Scof, ChainCatcher
Yesterday, the most discussed topic in the crypto industry was undoubtedly the Movement community's victory in its recent user rights campaign.
According to an official Binance announcement, Binance has terminated its market-making partnership with web3port, a market maker for Movement, and banned it from conducting further market-making activities on the platform. The market maker dumped a large amount of MOVE tokens shortly after their listing, causing significant market volatility and reportedly earning around 38 million USDT in net profit. To protect user interests, Binance has notified the Movement team and frozen the market maker’s profits, which are planned to be used for compensating affected users.
In response, community members remarked: "As long as the community stands united, torches can illuminate the darkness."
However, while this rights campaign may be considered a partial victory, many questions remain unanswered, and numerous mysteries still await resolution.
Starting from Community Controversy
Recently, prominent crypto KOL Bingwa published an article titled "Seven Questions for Movement: Confront the Facts and Respond Directly to Community Concerns," highlighting multiple issues within the Movement project and sparking widespread attention.
According to Rootdata, Movement is a modular framework compatible with Solidity, designed for building and deploying Move-based infrastructure and applications across distributed environments.
Initially, the $MOVE token airdrop distribution plan attracted significant community interest, promising to allocate 50%-60% of tokens to the community. However, in practice, the airdrop window was extremely short, the actual distribution ratio fell far below expectations, and the rules were complex and opaque—leaving many participants disappointed.
Data shows that 98.5% of addresses received fewer than 100 tokens, while certain addresses obtained as many as 490,000 tokens, raising serious concerns about fairness in distribution.
Many believe the airdrop was designed to create a "wealth illusion"—artificially inflating the token price before dumping for profit, collecting high gas fees, and even locking up portions of tokens, rendering users’ assets illiquid. These practices contradict the original "community-first" ethos and have been criticized as "retail investor harvesting."
In summary, the main grievances in the community rights movement center on three key points:
After the TGE launch, the airdrop window closed too quickly—after a gas war, the claim link went offline, preventing most retail users from claiming their tokens. Meanwhile, insiders and exchange users rushed through claims, artificially boosting sentiment and price, while early players offloaded holdings via insider accounts.
The project team repeatedly used manipulative rhetoric (PUA) to encourage users to wait for mainnet launch before claiming, continuing to inflate the price while selling large volumes off-market via OTC channels.
Users who bridged into the Movement mainnet to claim airdrops found they could not bridge assets back out, effectively trapping their funds and making them illiquid.
A Partial Victory for the Community?
Following Binance's termination of its relationship with the market maker, the Movement Network Foundation issued a statement saying it had no prior knowledge of the market maker’s actions. It explained that the collaboration began because the firm had previously supported projects within the Movement ecosystem. The foundation has now severed all ties with the market maker—including ecosystem partnerships—and has contacted other major exchanges to inform them of the ongoing investigation.
Throughout the incident, the Movement Network Foundation has actively cooperated with Binance and committed to using recovered funds from the market maker (MM) to repurchase $MOVE tokens on the open market.
Still Shrouded in Doubt
Although Binance has taken measures against the project team in the MOVE incident, marking a partial win for the community, many uncertainties persist:
For example, last December the project experienced a one-sided dump worth tens of millions of dollars. As a leading exchange, how could Binance possibly have missed this? If it truly was an operational error, why weren’t corrective actions taken immediately, instead of waiting four months to disclose the issue?
From another perspective, if the misconduct was indeed caused by the market maker, why hasn't the project team pursued legal action? And if the market maker bears full responsibility, why hasn't it publicly defended itself or provided any explanation? These unresolved questions demand further investigation and require transparent responses from both inside and outside the industry.
Only when the tide goes out do you see who’s been swimming naked.
While this incident marks a partial victory, the underlying questions remain unanswered. Protecting retail investors and ensuring fairness and transparency in the crypto market continue to be two persistent challenges hanging over Web3. Only by fully uncovering the truth can market trust be restored and the ideals of Web3 cease to be empty words.
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