Most Influential: Rushi Manche
The Movement Labs’ co-founder’s secret dealings and subsequent scandal stoked industry-wide anxieties about opaque token allocations and insider trading.
Before Rushi Manche’s ousting from Movement Labs, the crypto infrastructure startup he co-founded with fellow Vanderbilt University dropout Cooper Scanlon, he was a rising young star in the DeFi world.
This feature is a part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025 list.
But in April 2025, the buzzy project became embroiled in a scandal over hidden market-making deals connected to MOVE’s token launch. Internal documents obtained by CoinDesk showed that Movement Labs, under Manche’s leadership, had signed a contentious contract with a little-known intermediary firm, Rentech, which served simultaneously as a supposed subsidiary of the listed market-maker Web3Port and as an agent for the project. That structure gave Rentech control over roughly 66 million MOVE tokens —about 5% of the total supply —which were rapidly dumped on the market.
The dumping immediately caused a sharp collapse in MOVE’s price and widespread investor backlash. As scrutiny intensified, major exchanges, including Coinbase, either suspended or delisted the token. A few days after the initial scandal was revealed, Movement Labs suspended Manche pending a third-party governance review. After that, it didn’t take long for the company to announce Manche’s firing.
The scandal led to a leadership shake-up, reputational damage for the project, and a steep fall in token value. But beyond that, it fueled industry-wide anxiety about opaque token allocations and insider trading risks, prompting exchanges, investors and regulators to intensify scrutiny of early-stage token deals across the crypto sector.
Read more: Inside Movement’s Token-Dump Scandal: Secret Contracts, Shadow Advisers and Hidden Middlemen
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Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.
Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.
Why it matters:
Digital assets posted a third consecutive quarter of losses in Q2 2026, the longest losing streak since the 2022 bear market, as institutional capital rotated into AI equities and Bitcoin ETFs recorded their largest quarterly outflow since launch. Our report examines what drove the divergence, where structural adoption continued regardless, and what Q3 signals to watch.
