- Movement Foundation has terminated its partnership with a market maker over breach of agreement.
- The unnamed market maker sold 66 million MOVE shortly after Movement’s token generation event in December.
- Movement has announced a $38m buyback program for MOVE.
The Movement Network Foundation, the organization looking to empower the Move Virtual Machine blockchain ecosystem, has cut ties with an unnamed market maker amid the market maker’s breach of trust.
As well as ending all relationships with the market maker, the foundation has announced a $38 million buyback program for the Movement native token MOVE. The news has seen the price of MOVE bounce higher in the past 24 hours, rising by 7% at the time of writing to touch highs of $0.47 on major exchanges.
What happened?
Movement Network Foundation’s announcement follows a similar update from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume.
Per both Binance and Movement Foundation, the unnamed market maker violated agreed-upon terms, and is linked to a previous entity that Binance offboarded due to nefarious actions
According to Binance, the said market maker sold 66 million MOVE tokens just a day after the token’s listing. This happened on December 10, 2024 and saw the entity net $38 million in profit in USDT before Binance terminated the relationship on March 18, 2025.
Movement Foundation explained what happened in a blog announcement:
“Thanks to Binance, we learned that shortly after the $MOVE TGE in December 2024, the market maker sold a substantial amount of $MOVE without completing meaningful buy orders. This happened against our wishes, without our consent, and was in breach of our agreement, which required the MM to provide liquidity on both sides of the $MOVE/$USDT pair.”
Recovered $38 million to go into MOVE buyback program
Movement Labs, Movement Foundation and Binance have since collaborated as a recovery plan swung into action. The funds recovered add up to $38 million and is what Movement Foundation is committing to a buyback program.
“All cash proceeds recovered from the Market Maker will be used by the Movement Network Foundation to establish the Movement Strategic Reserve: a 38M $USDT buyback program to purchase $MOVE for long-term use and to return the USDT liquidity to the Movement ecosystem,” the Movement Foundation said.
Movement’s buyback plan will occur over the next three months and involve MOVE purchases on the open market. The buying will happen on Binance.
Given MOVE’s huge traction across the MoveVM ecosystem, a successful repurchase program could aid bulls.
The MOVE token traded to an all-time high of $1.45 on its market debut. However, it’s currently 69% off that peak as the crypto downturn added to the sell-off pressure.
