Move Over, MOVE: You Won’t Believe What Just Happened on Coinbase! 🚨

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Coinbase—whose very name conjures images of large, echoing vaults and people who know their acronyms—has decided to boot the Movement token (MOVE) right out the door on May 15 at 2:00 p.m. ET. The official reason? “Routine asset reviews,” which is exchange-speak for “Yes, we checked under the sofa cushions and still found something odd.”

The MOVE order books have now entered that curious state in which you can look, you can touch, but you can’t actually get anything out of the jar. Yes, it’s limit-only mode: if you want to buy or sell MOVE, you can only do so at a very specific price—sort of like asking, “Can I have a pizza, but only if it costs exactly $4.73?” No feeling lucky today.

Understandably, MOVE’s price did the financial equivalent of a theatrical swoon, dropping by roughly 20%, as if it had just been told it was allergic to money. Down it went from $0.25 to $0.20, leaving investors with just enough change to buy a stick of very underwhelming gum.

MOVE’s controversy (Now Starring Suspicion and Drama!)

Why all this excitement? Well, the show’s been heating up backstage. Movement Network was recently in the spotlight after co-founder Cooper Scanlon barely managed a dignified “it’s not you, it’s me” exit, i.e., a suspiciously-timed leave of absence. Not long after, scandalized whispers emerged about “market maker abnormalities,” which is financial gobbledygook for “something smells fishy and it isn’t the sushi bar next door.”

The center of this crypto soap opera: a potential pump-and-dump plot involving the market maker Web3Port—who are less a mysterious shadowy cabal and more of your typical, run-of-the-mill shadowy cabal. Just to keep things interesting, internal docs claim that a slice (over 5%) of all the MOVE in existence got handed to Web3Port, which then bounced it over to a cryptic outfit named Rentech. (Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if Rentech turned out to be three goblins in a trench coat.)

The fine print? Rentech could dump those tokens once MOVE’s fully diluted value topped $5 billion, which it somehow did, probably while everyone else was watching cat videos, on December 9 when Binance let MOVE out of its cage.

BREAKING : $MOVE will delisted from @coinbase .

Congratulations 🎊 to @movementlabsxyz @rushimanche

— Drop Bureau (@dropbureau) May 1, 2025

Web3Port wasted no time: 66 million MOVE tokens liquidated for $38 million, causing a price movement that can best be described as “avalanche with special effects.” Of course, those tokens are now worth more like $15.7 million, which is rather like selling your magic beans right before the beanstalk grows.

Half the spoils from these escapades, contracts say, were split between Rentech and the Movement Foundation—possibly after a round of rock-paper-scissors (or just a spreadsheet). Both Movement Foundation and Web3Port trace little tendrils back to World Liberty Financial Inc., a venture capital outfit reportedly related to people who like to put their names on buildings, i.e., the Trump family.

To top things off: in January, WLFI went shopping for MOVE, snapping up 3.42 million tokens for a cool $1.5 million, and also snagged a $10 million investment from Web3Port—presumably because someone had to keep the drama going into the new year.

Coinbase, ever the picture of composure, hasn’t mentioned the pump-and-dump drama by name. Instead, it helpfully clarifies that assets are “regularly monitored for compliance,” which in Discworld terms translates roughly to “We know something, but we’re not letting anyone else have the biscuit tin.”

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2025-05-01 21:07