The slew of troubles plaguing the Movement chain never ends. Tokens live transparently on the blockchain, but market making agreements do not. Today’s 0xResearch newsletter breaks down the opaque details around what looks to be a pump and dump scheme regarding the MOVE token.

In other news…are you coming to Permissionless IV Brooklyn in June? Tickets are $399 (for now!), but you can get one for half price with a unique 50% off discount code if you successfully refer 5 new subscribers to the 0xResearch newsletter. Scroll down for details.

REVving up the debate:

Blockworks Research’s Network REV dashboard shows Solana surging in April, capturing over 60% of layer-1 transaction-fee revenue by May 1 — up from around 40% at the month’s start. Tron holds steady at ~25%, while Ethereum’s share continues to shrink, despite still being one of the few chains with sustained net revenue. For REV proponents, this is a bullish signal: Revenue reflects usage, which should underpin value.

But not everyone agrees. In a widely circulated thread, Ryan Watkins questioned the entire premise: If chains can adopt stablecoins for gas and enshrine major apps like DEXs to capture more fees, what lasting role does the native token play — beyond being a tool for speculation or protocol incentives?

The responses were nuanced. Some argued native tokens still carry a “monetary premium” for their role in gas payments and security. Others warned that enshrining apps could hurt innovation and neutrality. Felix Hartmann likened REV to taxes in a digital nation state — necessary for protocol reinvestment, not mere profit. Still, others countered that GDP, not tax revenue, better reflects a chain’s true value.

In short: Revenue matters, but it’s not the full picture. Chains are competing economic systems, and REV is a useful data-driven and objective lens by which to judge them.

— Macauley Peterson

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We’ll cover:

• Food, caffeine, WiFi, vibes

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📅 June 22–23 | Brooklyn, NY | Register now!

The MOVE down

A lot has happened since I last wrote on Movement. At the time, the chain was not live.

About a month later on April 15, Blockworks’ Katherine Ross and Jack Kubinec broke a story on market maker “misconduct” around the project’s MOVE token on the Binance exchange.

The market marker was alleged by ZachXBT to be linked to market making firm Web3Port. At the time, MOVE traded at $0.29, about 74% down from its highs of $1.12 in December.

Movement Labs co-founder Rushi Manche was also reportedly taking a “temporary leave” from the company, a claim that Manche neither explicitly affirmed nor denied at the time.

As of yesterday, Movement officially confirmed that Manche has been suspended “in light of ongoing events” regarding “organizational governance and recent incidents involving a market maker.”

The market maker in question was confirmed to be Web3Port in a CoinDesk exposé published on Wednesday.

The market maker reportedly sold 66m MOVE tokens (worth $38m and about 2.64% of the total circulating supply at the time) on Dec. 9, 2024 — the day of the token’s Binance listing. On Mar. 25, Binance banned the market maker engaged by Movement after it netted a profit of $38m.

In the aftermath of the Binance ban, Movement quickly condemned the market maker, citing that the firm’s actions were “against our wishes, without our consent, and in breach of our agreement.” Within the same blog post, Movement quickly announced a $38m MOVE buyback program to “return the USDT liquidity to the Movement ecosystem.”

Coinbase exchange announced today too its decision to suspend trading on the MOVE token. MOVE has plummeted to $0.19, down about 21% in the last 24 hours.

The exposé

CoinDesk’s piece revealed that Web3Port had initially floated a contract with Movement Foundation that included a clause allowing the market maker to liquidate its MOVE positions on the condition that the token reached a $5b FDV, then shared profits on a 50-50 basis.

Movement initially pushed back against the contractual agreements. Yet, after some revisions, the resulting signed agreement retained the market maker’s ability to “sell tokens for a profit,” CoinDesk reported.

According to Movement Foundation’s general counsel YK Pek, the renegotiated agreement used a “variable interest” mechanism where a portion of tokens would be loaned to Web3Port only when the token price exceeded a certain rate. 

This was an improvement over the previous proposed clause that would not require the market maker to sell any tokens below a $5b FDV price. It helped to solve for the “incentive misalignment with a hard dump figure at 5bn,” Pek said in the X post.

Web3Port’s contract with Movement Foundation was brokered through Rentech, a questionable middleman entity that looks to be a Web3Port subsidiary.

The real controversy, Movement Foundation’s general counsel YK Pek said, was that the foundation was misled into entering an agreement under a false impression, rather than on the terms themselves.

— Donovan Choy

Disclosure: Blockworks co-founder Jason Yanowitz is an angel investor in Movement Labs.

Union’s improvements upon Tendermint consensus through CometBLS, coupled with ZK proving through Galois, allow for a broadly scalable, cost efficient, and low latency IBC implementation that is feasibly scalable across every existing blockchain, virtual machine and runtime. Union’s implementation offers modular crosschain interoperability without the need for trusted intermediaries.  

A DeFi lottery with a catch

Maple’s new $500k SyrupUSDC prize draw is a clever blend of DeFi-native yield and old-school gamification. Deposit $1k+, hold for six months, and you could win up to $300k USDC.

But there’s a catch. US or EEA citizens/residents need not apply. According to the Terms and Conditions, any prize won will be subject to KYC checks and those jurisdictions are excluded — likely due to the mix of prize-linked deposits triggering gambling, securities and/or MiCA compliance issues.

For the rest of the world, the idea is sticky: attracting long-term TVL via a mix of native yield, some lottery odds and a leaderboard of ticket holders. But the global restrictions limit its reach and make it feel more like a marketing experiment than a true protocol flywheel.

Pool Together pioneered the no-loss lottery via a decentralized setup, albeit with smaller and more frequent prize drawings, and passed its legal test.

I look forward to the day we can drop restrictive terms and geo-blocks. Until then, SyrupUSDC looping is also live on Morpho, letting you earn +3-4% APY per loop, including Drips. For smoother UX, Contango offers automated SyrupUSDC strategies, simplifying the leverage loop.

DeFi innovation beyond raw APR is welcome, but until there are compliant paths to engage, the best incentives may still be the composable crypto-native ones — not conditional jackpots.

— Macauley Peterson