Three wallets, one denial, and $5.7 billion in market cap disappeared in 48 hours.
RaveDAO’s RAVE plummeted 90% in 24 hours as crypto exchanges Binance and Bitget opened investigations into the trading activity that catapulted the token to a $6 billion market cap last week.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen confirmed the investigation into X, and Binance co-CEO Richard Teng later said the exchange was reviewing the matter and would “always” do its part to examine signs of market misconduct. Gate.io was also mentioned in the original allegations by on-chain researcher ZachXBT, who offered a $25,000 reward for whistleblowers with evidence from the parties involved.
The collapse accelerated after the project’s rejection on Saturday rather than stabilizing.
RaveDAO posted a six-part X thread stating that the team “has no involvement in nor is it responsible for the recent price action.”
The thread did not address any of the specific on-chain allegations that sparked scrutiny, including the concentration of roughly 90% of RAVE’s billion supply in three Gnosis Safe multi-signature wallets attributed to the team, or the millions of tokens transferred to exchanges shortly before the rally began.
The original rally took RAVE from about $0.25 to $27.33 in nine days, a 10,800% move that triggered $44 million in liquidations on Friday, just behind bitcoin and ether, with most of them from short sellers positioned against the token.
The researchers pointed to a “bait and sell” pattern in which visible transfers of tokens to exchanges suggested incoming selling pressure, luring traders into short positions before those tokens were withdrawn and prices rose, forcing shorts to cover progressively worse levels.
RaveDAO bills itself as a Web3 entertainment platform that offers chain ticketing for electronic music events, and its origins date back to an after-party in Istanbul in 2023. The project reported around $3 million in revenue in 2025 and lists partnerships with Binance, OKX, Bitget, and Polygon.
The RaveDAO thread confirmed that the team plans to “liquidate portions of unlocked tokens” when appropriate to fund operations and marketing, and said it was “exploring appropriate models, including price- or performance-triggered lockups, that link team incentives to ecosystem growth.”
However, it did not commit to any specific blocking mechanism or timeline.
