Before Rushi Manche was ousted from Movement Labs, the crypto infrastructure startup he co-founded with Vanderbilt University dropout Cooper Scanlon, he was a rising young star in the DeFi world.
This feature is part of CoinDesk The Most Influential List of 2025.
But in April 2025, the buzzy project was embroiled in a hidden market-making trading scandal related to the MOVE token issuance. Internal documents obtained by CoinDesk show that Movement Labs under Manche signed a controversial contract with Rentech, a little-known intermediary company that serves as both a subsidiary of publicly traded market maker Web3Port and an agent for the project. This structure gave Rentech control of approximately 66 million MOVE tokens—about 5% of the total supply—that were quickly dumped onto the market.
This dumping immediately caused the price of MOVE to plummet and caused a widespread rebound among investors. As scrutiny intensified, major exchanges including Coinbase suspended or delisted the token. Days after the initial scandal broke, Movement Labs suspended Manche pending a third-party governance review. Shortly thereafter, the company announced Manche’s dismissal.
The scandal resulted in leadership changes, damage to the project’s reputation, and a sharp decline in the token’s value. But beyond that, it has heightened industry-wide concerns about opaque token allocations and insider trading risks, prompting exchanges, investors and regulators to increase scrutiny of early-stage token trading across the crypto industry.
Read more: Inside Movement’s Token Dump Scandal: Secret Contracts, Shadow Advisors, and Hidden Middlemen