Three wallets, one refusal and a market capitalization of $5.7 billion gone in 48 hours.
RaveDAO’s RAVE crashed 90% in 24 hours as crypto exchanges Binance and Bitget opened investigations into the trading activity that catapulted the token to a $6 billion market cap last week.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen confirmed the investigation into Gate.io was also named in the initial allegations by onchain investigator ZachXBT, who offered a $25,000 bounty to whistleblowers with evidence from the parties involved.
The collapse accelerated after the project was rejected on Saturday, rather than stabilizing.
RaveDAO posted a six-part X thread stating that the team “is not engaged or responsible for recent price action.”
The thread did not address any of the specific on-chain allegations that prompted the review, including the concentration of approximately 90% of RAVE’s billion supply on three Gnosis Safe multi-sig wallets allocated to the team, or the millions of tokens transferred to exchanges shortly before the rally began.
The initial rally took RAVE from around $0.25 to $27.33 in nine days, a 10,800% move that triggered $44 million in liquidations on Friday, second only to bitcoin and ether, with most of it coming from short sellers positioned against the token.
Investigators reported a “bait and liquidate” pattern in which visible transfers of tokens to exchanges suggested incoming selling pressure, luring traders into short positions before those tokens were withdrawn and prices rose, forcing shorts to cover at increasingly worse levels.
RaveDAO bills itself as a Web3 entertainment platform offering on-chain ticketing for electronic music events, with origins dating back to an Istanbul afterparty in 2023. The project brought in around $3 million in revenue in 2025 and lists partnerships with Binance, OKX, Bitget, and Polygon.
The RaveDAO thread confirmed that the team plans to “liquidate portions of unlocked tokens” where appropriate to fund operations and marketing, and said it is “exploring appropriate models, including price- or performance-triggered locks, that tie team incentives to ecosystem growth.”
However, he did not commit to a blocking mechanism or a specific timetable.
