Sometimes clarifying what cannot be done leaves behind a gray area.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

Recently, Binance released a risk warning for market makers in the cryptocurrency market and a guide for project parties and users. Many interpreted it as Binance strengthening its control over market makers, but the guide did not explicitly mention an upgrade in control, mainly reminding project parties and users to be vigilant against some harmful behaviors of market makers.

Currently, Binance's supervision and punishment of market manipulation still follow its "Binance Market Surveillance Program" mentioned in an article published in February 2025, primarily targeting three types of market manipulation behaviors:

• Fake orders: Misleading others’ judgments on supply and demand by placing a large number of fake orders and then quickly canceling them;
• Wash trading: The sole purpose of buying and selling assets by the same entity is to artificially inflate its trading volume;
• Price ramping: Coordinated efforts to raise prices and then conduct organized selling.

This time, Binance specifically named six potential market behaviors that could involve manipulation, including selling actions conflicting with token issuance plans, unilateral trading, cross-platform coordinated selling, transaction volumes inconsistent with price trends, price spikes or drops when liquidity is insufficient, and imbalances between trading volume and liquidity.

For users who frequently participate in trading, especially those involved in crypto trading, the above situations have been seen to varying degrees, and some individuals have even fallen victim to market manipulation. Even if Binance has not further raised its standards, the publication itself demonstrates a stern attitude towards market manipulation by market makers, and Binance indicated at the end of the article that it would take swift and decisive measures against any violations, including blacklisting violating market makers.

However, in the more than 20 days following the release of this article, there have been multiple occurrences of "rollercoaster" price movements of tokens...

Dozens of Times Rise of "Monster Tokens" in a Week

If a token’s price exhibits a unidirectional trend in a short period of time and can maintain that trend, it is generally considered a collective effort by the market. However, if there are violent fluctuations in a short period of time, even if market makers are not intentionally causing it, it is highly likely to be market manipulation by large funds.

The most representative tokens showing abnormal conditions recently are STO and RAVE.

The StakeStone token STO began to rise after reaching a low of $0.0727 on March 25, climbing to around $0.2 seven days later. In the following two days, it peaked at approximately $1.8, having increased nearly 25 times in nine days. As a project that has completed over $30 million in financing, with investors including Polychain Capital, YZi Labs, and OKX Ventures, a significant rise is not unusual, but astonishingly, after reaching a price six times higher than the previous peak, STO fell back to around $0.11 in less than two days.

From the market perspective, this extreme fluctuation can be described as a typical example of "price ramping." Large transfer information on the blockchain also confirms this.

According to monitoring by Lookonchain, a newly created address transferred approximately 25.5 million STO from Binance on March 31 and April 1, accounting for 11.32% of the circulating supply, coinciding with the two days prior to the rollercoaster action where STO rose from around $0.5 to $1.8 and then fell back to $0.2.

On the day of the rollercoaster action, this newly created address starting with 0x5e2 withdrew tokens from Binance, along with approximately 28 million STO obtained from other channels (approximately 12.43% of the circulating supply) deposited into Gate.io.

Although internal operations of exchanges are unclear, this complete time correspondence can almost verify that this is a typical case of market manipulation: manipulators purchased a large number of tokens at low prices and transferred them out of the exchange for storage, using insufficient liquidity to raise prices at a low cost, and then quickly sold the accumulated tokens. Of course, investors who followed the market to buy, as well as short positions that were liquidated in the contract market, also played a role in amplifying the price fluctuations.

The situation with the RAVE token is believed to be a form of manipulation that profits from influencing the spot price in the contract market.

The price of RAVE had hovered between $0.2 and $0.3 for nearly two months before suddenly starting a significant rise on April 9, peaking at nearly $20 within seven days, creating a "miracle" of nearly a hundred times.

Behind the strange price movements, there were also unusual large on-chain movements. According to Ai Yi’s monitoring, at the starting point of RAVE’s rise, two addresses suspected to belong to the same entity transferred a total of 18.58 million RAVE to Bitget. The two addresses continued to transfer, totaling approximately 30.58 million RAVE over three days, accounting for about 12% of the total circulating amount.

However, shortly afterwards, the related addresses transferred out about 31.94 million RAVE from Bitget. This move has been interpreted by many analysts as an attempt to create the illusion of "market maker selling" through substantial transfers to the exchange, and the subsequent continued rise aimed to profit by going long in the contract market. Currently, RAVE's price is still on the rise, and no large transfers to exchanges have occurred temporarily.

On-chain data shows that the top ten holders of RAVE possess 98% of the total tokens. Currently, RAVE's price has not seen a significant drop like STO, possibly indicating that the market manipulation is not yet over, or that the manipulators believe insufficient liquidity in the spot market and have no plans to cash out through it.

Policies Above, Countermeasures Below

Recently, there have been many tokens exhibiting similar abnormal market behaviors along with large on-chain transfers, such as SIREN and ARIA, which also saw fluctuations in a matter of days. However, analyzing the specific situations of these "monster tokens" reveals that they have not violated the rules set by Binance.

For the manipulators of STO, although there were indeed large withdrawals from Binance, this action did not violate any regulations, and since STO has launched on many exchanges, the manipulators do not necessarily operate on Binance; even if manipulators affect prices through Binance accounts, Binance blocking such accounts would not have a significant impact because the main profit source for manipulators comes from selling on Gate.io.

The manipulation of RAVE is even more concealed. Binance merely launched the contract trading market for RAVE, and manipulators can easily spread multiple accounts to open small long positions and then influence prices on Bitget to profit; even Binance is not necessarily the manipulators' "main battlefield." For dozens or even hundreds of ordinary accounts that have passed KYC, as long as they pay attention to the sources of USDT across various addresses, even if Binance detects suspicious activity, it cannot produce sufficient evidence to prove that these accounts are indeed related to market manipulation.

As for some tokens listed on Binance Alpha, due to their limited liquidity and relatively low market capitalization, even a small amount of funds can significantly influence price movements, and in many cases, it may not even qualify as manipulation.

These actual cases serve as a wake-up call for both investors and exchanges. Insider trading and market manipulation behaviors have prevailed in the cryptocurrency industry, causing substantial losses for many investors, leading to ongoing calls for exchanges to strengthen regulation. In recent years, many exchanges have announced penalties for market manipulation, but "insufficient anti-manipulation" means "definitively not anti-manipulation"; while exchanges are not intentionally neglecting these issues, the emergence of rules implies that not violating them is permitted, and the ambiguity of the rules effectively opens the green light for malicious acts that circumvent them.

Simply targeting manipulative behavior within a single exchange's internal control is very easy for seasoned financial market veterans to bypass. STO and RAVE are very realistic examples. In addition to monitoring and punishing obvious manipulative behaviors, exchanges should also establish responsive measures for related behaviors that may involve market manipulation and set up cross-exchange monitoring of abnormal activities. For instance, in the case of STO, once large amounts of tokens withdrawn from Binance are all transferred to Gate.io, Gate.io should take measures like suspending trading functionality as soon as it detects selling behavior from that account to prevent the continuation of malicious activities.

Recently, many exchanges have launched trading for tokenized US stocks. For cryptocurrency exchanges, in addition to supporting trading of US stocks, they should also learn from the mature systems established through complete regulatory mechanisms and stringent penalty measures in US stock markets. This largest capital market in the world has proven one thing over the course of a century: trust is the long-term path.

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