Unchained
Unchained
Laura Shin
Crypto Pump & Dumps Have Become the Ugly Norm. Can They Be Stopped? - Ep. 834
1 hour 17 minutes Posted May 13, 2025 at 4:00 pm.
Intro
What Omar’s and Taran’s companies do
How market making works and how crypto twists the model
Why crypto’s market maker incentives are broken by design
What it would take to fix shady market maker behavior
How some founders exploit launch day hype to dump on retail
Did Mantra’s JP pull off a “genius” move or manipulate the market?
Whether crypto traders do any research before apeing in
How founders are incentivized to dump their own tokens
Why VCs may be fueling this problem with insider deals
What crypto needs to learn from traditional finance
The biggest fixes the industry must prioritize to stop these scams
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Show notes
The Movement Labs scandal exposed more than just one bad deal –  it pulled back the curtain on a widespread problem in crypto: how some market makers, founders, and VCs play games to make money — whether the project succeeds or not.
In this episode, Laura speaks with José Macedo of Delphi Labs, Omar Shakeeb of SecondLane, and Taran Sabharwal of STIX to explain:
How market makers are supposed to work, and how they operate in crypto
Why insider selling is more common than you think
How projects like Movement, Mantra, and others exploit launch day hype
Whether VCs often enable this behavior with side deals that retail never hears about
And what the industry needs to do to fix this broken system
Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com
Bitwise
José Macedo, founder at Delphi Labs
Omar Shakeeb, cofounder of SecondLane
Taran Sabharwal, founder and CEO of STIX.
Movement Labs:
Unchained: How MOVE’s Contracts Put a Pump and Dump Into a Legal Agreement
CoinDesk: Inside Movement’s Token-Dump Scandal: Secret Contracts, Shadow Advisers and Hidden Middlemen
Market making:
The Chopping Block: Can Crypto Clean Itself Up? Market Structure, Trust, and Regulation 
Mantra Founder Is Burning 150 Million Tokens. Would He Try to Get Them Returned?
ZachXBT Ties REEF Founders to OM Token Crash
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