Protocol: Inside Movement Token Leak Scandal
Author: Margot Neickerk | Edited by Sam Kessler April 30, 2025, 6:38 PM
This article appears in the latest edition of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter analyzing cryptocurrency technology one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.
Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly roundup of the biggest stories in crypto tech. My name is Margot Nijkerk, and I’m an Ethereum protocol reporter on CoinDesk’s tech team.
In this issue:
MOVEMENT TOKEN LEAK SCANDAL: Movement, a prominent crypto startup backed by Trump’s World Liberty Financial, was reported to be closing a $100 million Series B round. However, following an investigation by CoinDesk, the network has found itself at the center of an insider trading scandal that has exposed some questionable aspects of its crypto dealmaking. Movement Labs is investigating whether it misled itself by signing a market-making agreement that gave an unknown intermediary control over 66 million MOVE tokens, leading to a $38 million sell-off after the token’s launch. Internal contracts show Rentech, a firm with no digital footprint, listed on both sides of the deal, once as a subsidiary of Web3Port and once as an agent of the Movement Foundation, raising questions about self-dealing. Foundation officials initially labeled Rentech’s deal as “possibly the worst deal” they had ever seen; Experts warned that this created incentives for MOVE to bid up its price ahead of the token dump to retail investors. The incident exposed a rift in Movement’s senior management, with executives, legal counsel, and advisors under scrutiny for their role in facilitating the agreement despite internal objections. — Sam Kessler Read more.
ETH PROPOSAL SEEKS TO INCREASE GAS LIMIT: Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist has unveiled EIP-9698, a plan to allow the blockchain’s gas limit to increase automatically over the next four years. The EIP introduces a deterministic “exponential” schedule built into the default client settings that raises the gas limit by a small, preset amount every epoch. These predictable increases in the gas limit allow existing validators to keep their machines running, reducing the need for unexpected upgrades. If approved and implemented, the gas limit would increase from 36 million units to around 3.6 billion, allowing for around 6,000 simple transfers per block and over 2,000 transactions per second (TPS). Ethereum’s current TPS is around 15-20 TPS. — Shaurya Malwa Read more.
BITCOIN BLOCKCHAIN DATA DEBATE RESURRECTS AS FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
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