On March 23, 2026, in East 8 Time Zone, while the SIREN token surged approximately 30 times in a month and a half, it was reported that it had been highly controlled: approximately 644 million SIREN tokens are held by 52 associated addresses, accounting for about 88.5% of the circulation. This ratio is 22 percentage points higher than the figures previously disclosed by the project team, and after the price was continuously pushed up, the concentration drastically increased, triggering collective inquiries about "market manipulation" and the gap in information disclosure. The so-called on-chain transparent token distribution starkly contrasts with the highly concentrated chip structure in reality, exposing the core contradiction and systemic risk line between "visible" and "trustworthy" in the cryptocurrency market.

The High Concentration of 52 Addresses Holding 88% Chips

At the on-chain data level, the most glaring fact about SIREN is that 52 associated addresses collectively control approximately 644 million SIREN, corresponding to 88.5% of the circulating supply. This means that the vast majority of ostensibly circulating tokens are actually locked in the hands of a few addresses within the same interest group, making the circulating "market" more like a price stage performed by a small pool of chips. Compared to the concentration of holdings previously disclosed by the project, multiple media calculated that this actual controlling ratio is 22 percentage points higher than the official figures, directly breaching the trust boundary in the project narrative regarding token distribution and risk control.

About this set of data, analysts have used the term "typical left-hand to right-hand control mode" to describe the current situation: the market manipulators create the illusion of a distributed holding appearance and active trading volume on-chain through multiple associated addresses' mutual transfers and wash trading, but the control power has never left the hands of a few. For ordinary investors, what they see are traceable on-chain addresses and trades, but they struggle to identify whether the true controllers behind these addresses share the same origin and can only passively play the roles of high-buyers during price increases and support during selling phases.

This high concentration of holdings also lays structural hidden dangers for potential sell-offs and sharp volatility in the future. When 88.5% of the circulating supply is held within the same controlling group, any large-scale sell-off, pledge, or release will amplify onto the public market price performance in a leveraged manner: with slight disturbances, the market could quickly exhibit extreme patterns similar to "flash crash - rapid rebound," while peripheral retail investors have nearly no negotiation space in such environments, only able to passively endure price violent repricing under the manipulator's rhythm.

The 30 Times Surge in a Month and a Half and Retail Investors' Passive Involvement

From a price perspective, the trajectory of SIREN rising approximately 30 times in a month and a half provides the most intuitive stage for the control narrative. From the end of January to March 23 over this six-week period, SIREN was pushed from an obscure small-market token to a price surge of dozens of times; on the surface, it appears to be the “new star driven by hot narratives,” but behind it lies continuous long positions of highly concentrated chips in a narrow liquidity that raise the price to a height sufficient to attract significant retail investor attention. The steeper the trend, the more it can create "get-rich samples" on social media and trend charts, attracting more latecomers to buy in.

However, when such a surge combines with the 88.5% degree of control, the nature of retail participation undergoes a qualitative change: they are no longer engaging in relatively fair price games with other market participants but are swept into a chip game controlled by a few manipulators. Insights from techflow indicate that "highly concentrated token distribution will amplify market volatility risks,” and in the SIREN scenario, this risk is not only reflected in price fluctuations but also in that retail investors can scarcely acquire time and spatial information about the manipulators' real actions, making any attempt to "exit wisely" potentially land them right on the opposite side of the manipulators’ selling actions.

Surrounding this 30-fold rally, the market has also realized a critical cognitive blind spot: the current public information lacks details on the manipulators' specific operation timeline and whether there is collusion with exchanges. We know there is high control and extreme price rises, but it is difficult to reconstruct how the chips circulate both on and off the market, and how the liquidity has been "organized" to cooperate with the market's performance. This information deficit makes it hard for ordinary investors to assess when and at what price they are truly opposing the manipulators, only able to trace back a path of an already opaque narrative on the candlestick chart afterwards.

The Vague Boundaries When DWF's Name is Mentioned

In discussions about the identity of the market manipulators, the market and media currently focus on DWF Labs. Based on the associations of on-chain addresses, historical market-making records, and information around the project, some studies and reports speculate that the actual operators behind these 52 associated addresses are likely to be connected with DWF Labs. However, this inference remains at the level of "based on on-chain and behavioral pattern reasoning," and has not received formal confirmation from the project team or DWF Labs. In the absence of official statements or written disclosures, equating "suspected manipulators" directly with "confirmed manipulators" poses a boundary risk in the narrative.

This ambiguous area reflects the duality of the role of market makers in the crypto market. On one hand, the official narrative for introducing market makers is to provide depth and liquidity: they alleviate severe price fluctuations and enhance matching efficiency through orders and counter-orders; on the other hand, when the inventory and callable chip scale held by market makers are sufficiently large, they inherently possess the structural ability to dominate price and rhythm—in certain circumstances, this ability does not have a clear demarcation from traditional "manipulation."

In the SIREN incident, the most glaring aspect is not the repeated mentioning of a name, but rather how the lack of disclosure responsibilities by the project team combined with the opacity of the market-making structure magnifies systemic risks. If the project merely vaguely claims "there is participation from a professional market-making institution" without disclosing the approximate range of market-making positions, whether market-making and proprietary trading are isolated, or whether the same entity is allowed to operate across multiple trading venues, then the highly concentrated chips seen on-chain become difficult for investors to price rationally— they could be either "normal market-making inventory" or "tokens that can be dumped at any time by manipulators," and this uncertainty itself constitutes a risk premium.

The Systemic Fragility from SIREN to GhostClaw

Almost simultaneously with the SIREN control controversy, the security research institution disclosed the GhostClaw malware incident, adding another dimension to this narrative. According to reports from techflow and panews, during the same period, GhostClaw infected 178 developers through an npm package supply chain attack, targeting the development environments of cryptocurrency and Web3-related projects. This means that even if a certain project itself does not have obvious chip manipulation issues, its underlying development toolchain might be silently implanted with malicious code, affecting contract security and user asset safety.

The so-called npm package supply chain attack essentially targets the source of the development link: attackers disguise malicious code as commonly used dependencies or mixed contributions in open-source libraries; when developers unknowingly update or introduce related dependencies, the malware enters the project's building and deployment process. From this perspective, GhostClaw does not directly attack a single token but attempts to "plant mines" at the infrastructure level of the entire cryptocurrency project ecosystem, which, once triggered, will erupt in the form of contract backdoors, data leaks, or permission hijacking.

If the risk of SIREN lies in the concentration of token distribution leading to price and liquidity fluctuations, then GhostClaw represents the systemic risk on the protocol and asset level caused by attacks on developer toolchains. The two seem unrelated: one occurs in the secondary market while the other lurks in code and building systems; yet they both point to the same issue—continuing fragility in security and governance within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. The control controversy of a single project is often packaged as a "case," but when we connect chip concentration, supply chain attacks, and contract audit gaps, it resembles a risk web tightly woven in each link rather than isolated spontaneous events.

Order and Noise Under a $316.2 Billion Market Capitalization

From a more macro asset landscape perspective, according to single-source data from DeFiLlama, the current total market capitalization of related assets is approximately $316.268 billion, of which USDT accounts for approximately 58.23%, forming the most scalable and sticky funding anchor in the cryptocurrency market. On the surface, this pattern conveys the signal of “the order of top assets is firm, and funding liquidity is abundant”—mainstream trading pairs build relatively stable liquidity pools based on large-scale assets like USDT, providing overall market depth and settlement capabilities that are predictable.

In stark contrast to this is the high-risk gambling ground played out by small-market-cap tokens like SIREN: on one side is a relatively stable funding order in the hundreds of billions, while on the other is an extreme situation with a 30-fold surge in just a month and a half and a control ratio reaching 88.5%. For the vast majority of participants, their asset exposure fluctuates back and forth between top assets and highly volatile tokens, while control events like SIREN and security attacks like GhostClaw are more like systemic noise interspersed in this primary funding channel—often ignored but capable of causing overflow impacts on sentiment, trust, and valuation systems once they explode.

The problem is that when what’s visible on the surface is transaction depth and the “prosperity” of price curves, there are frequent incidents of controlled tokens, supply chain attacks, and security vulnerabilities at the foundational level, leading market participants to often systematically underestimate the importance of disclosure quality and security architecture while chasing high-yield narratives. Token distribution charts in project white papers might seriously misalign with actual on-chain control; safety audit reports marked as "approved" may not cover increasingly complex supply chain attack paths. Under such structures, when investors rush toward the next 30-fold story, they may fail to consciously weigh "control risks" and "toolchain security" equally.

The Next Round of Correction Between On-Chain Visibility and Information Trustworthiness

Returning to the SIREN event itself, its most representative significance lies in the stark display of the huge gap between “on-chain transparency” and “information trustworthiness”. We can see every transaction and every address balance in the block explorer, yet it is hard to directly deduce the concentration and association structure of the control power behind them; project teams can provide seemingly compliant distribution disclosures in white papers and official websites, yet these can easily be breached by the actual holding structures on-chain. This mismatch creates a non-negligible vacuum between “verifiable” and “trustworthy.”

For investors, the next stage of fundamental review cannot stay at shallow indicators like "looking at contracts, market capitalization, and circulation." Holding concentration, associations between addresses, and differences between project disclosures and on-chain facts should all be included in the minimum due diligence checklist: Are there reasonable explanations for the high concentration? Are there obvious signs of multiple addresses having the same origin? Is there a significant deviation between officially disclosed figures and third-party on-chain analyses? The answers to these questions directly determine whether a token is a “high-volatility asset” or a “high-risk chip pool.”

From an industry perspective, SIREN is just one of many cases, but it exposes the structural absence of disclosure and governance by project teams and market-making institutions. If market-making positions, inventory management mechanisms, and the degree of isolation between market-making and proprietary trading remain invisible for a long time, then the gray area between market-making and manipulation will persist. Raising disclosure standards and introducing more detailed position and market-making reporting mechanisms is not just to “soothe sentiments,” but to compress the arbitrage space created by asymmetric information at the institutional level.

Looking ahead, against the backdrop of frequent control, market-making, and security attacks, regulation and industry self-discipline will most likely evolve along the same main line: one end is stronger disclosure and review requirements for holding concentration, market-making structure, and associated addresses, while the other end is higher baseline standards for developer toolchain security and supply chain attack protection. Whether ultimately led by regulatory agencies or industry alliances, the goal of this round of correction will be to bring “on-chain visibility” closer to “information trustworthiness”—only when transparency moves beyond surface data and delves into control rights, motives, and risk structures can narratives like SIREN’s truly diminish, rather than being repackaged and repeated.

Join our community, let’s discuss, and become stronger together!
Official Telegram community: https://t.me/aicoincn
AiCoin Chinese Twitter: https://x.com/AiCoinzh

OKX Welfare Group: https://aicoin.com/link/chat?cid=l61eM4owQ
Binance Welfare Group: https://aicoin.com/link/chat?cid=ynr7d1P6Z

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。