Exchanges face heat as OKX funds ZachXBT probe into 95% RAVE crash

OKX founder Mingxing “Star” Xu boosts ZachXBT’s bounty on alleged RAVE token manipulation to $25,000 after a 95% crash from roughly $26 to near $1 wipes out billions in value.

OKX founder and CEO Star said the exchange will contribute an additional $25,000 bounty to back on‑chain investigator ZachXBT’s probe into suspected market manipulation of the RAVE token, adding to the sleuth’s own reward pool.

OKX joins hunt for RAVE manipulators

In a post amplifying ZachXBT’s thread on X, Star said OKX’s “risk engine is monitoring the situation closely” and that the exchange would “support any efforts to uncover insider abuse and protect users,” aligning the platform with calls for greater accountability around the trade.

ZachXBT has accused insiders of orchestrating a pump‑and‑dump in RAVE, alleging that wallets tied to the team and early distribution controlled over 90% of the token’s supply while retail traders chased a meteoric rally. He wrote that “wallets linked to early distribution controlled about 95% of RAVE’s 1 billion token supply,” and said large transfers to exchanges before the surge suggested “blatant market manipulation” designed to offload tokens onto late buyers.

According to data compiled by outlets such as CoinGape, RAVE jumped from around $0.25 to roughly $27.33 in just nine to 11 days, an increase of about 10,800–11,000% that triggered roughly $44 million in liquidations, mostly on short positions. The vertical move pushed the token’s valuation toward approximately $6 billion before a wave of selling sent the price down by around 95% to near $1, wiping out almost $6 billion in paper market cap on less than $52 million of liquidations.

In a detailed summary on X, ZachXBT described the pattern as “a textbook pump and dump,” arguing that such a mismatch between market value lost and liquidations “is not normal in a healthy market structure.” He also said he had contacted a RaveDAO co‑founder days before going public but “received no response” and later raised his personal bounty from $10,000 to $25,000 for whistleblowers with proof of insider wrongdoing.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen publicly thanked ZachXBT “for highlighting” the issue and confirmed that Bitget had “started investigating into $RAVE,” while Binance and Gate acknowledged similar review requests as scrutiny intensified. RaveDAO, for its part, has denied engaging in or being responsible for the price action, even as exchanges and investigators now sift through on‑chain flows and order‑book data to determine whether coordinated insiders turned RAVE’s 11,000% run‑up into one of crypto’s ugliest crashes of 2026.