The Plasma team has been accused of insider trading amid the collapse of XPL.

# The Plasma team was accused of insider trading amid the XPL crash.

The creator of the stablecoin project Plasma, Paul Fex, rejected allegations of insider trading after the price of XPL fell by more than 40%. Some community members continue to doubt his statements.

We’ve seen a number of rumors circulating since the launch of XPL and want to set the record straight.

1/ No team members have sold any XPL. All investor and team XPL is locked for 3 years with a 1 year cliff.

2/ Of our team of ~50, three spent time at Blur or Blast. Our team…

— Paul (@pauliepunt) October 1, 2025

“No team member has sold XPL. All their assets and investors' coins are locked for three years with a one-year vesting,” he wrote.

Plasma launched the beta version of the mainnet and the native token on September 25. XPL debuted at $1.3, and three days later reached an all-time high of $1.68. Since then, its price has decreased by 41.8%, according to CoinGecko.

At the time of writing, the asset is trading at $0.9

Hourly chart of XPL/USDT on the Binance exchange. Source: TradingView The community suspected representatives of Plasma of using algorithmic sales through the TWAP method, where large orders are broken down into smaller parts. A user under the pseudonym ManaMoon pointed out the transfer of more than 600 million XPL from the team's wallet to exchanges before the launch.

OK so I actually dug into what happened with $XPL, the vaults, and the Wintermute accusations.

First, I wanted to see where the Plasma Team Vault was sending their tokens so I looked at each notable transfer from their vault.

Vault address:… pic.twitter.com/lKbWmuh2AA

— ManaMoon (@ManaMoonNFT) September 30, 2025

“Personally, I believe that someone was conducting TWAP sales of an excessive volume of coins that retail buyers could not handle,” he wrote.

A community member under the nickname crypto — popseye also accused the market maker Wintermute of the XPL price collapse.

Momentum completely ruined by the team dumping 800m tokens

With wintermute as the MM@Plasma $xpl pretty much destroyed their chart and momentum and I hope their project fails (it probably will given how dumb they are) $aster made me hold this a bit longer than I wanted to…

— crypto — popseye (papovic) 🛸 🏠 🍄 (@crypto_popseye) September 30, 2025

“Plasma destroyed its schedule and momentum, so I hope their project fails,” he said

Fex denied the connection of the project with the platform and noted that he possesses the same information as the other users.

“We did not hire Wintermute as a market maker and never entered into contracts with them for any services,” he emphasized

Not everyone is convinced

The community reacted skeptically to the words of the founder of Plasma. crypto — popseye noted that Fex excluded sales from the team, but at the same time left the status of other categories of tokens, for example, those allocated for “ecosystem and its growth,” unclear.

“Everyone understands that they were implemented, but you phrased the tweet as if that didn't happen. Stop lying, Polly, you can't deceive on-chain,” he wrote.

The user with the pseudonym Melardev agreed with him. He pointed out that there are more coins on the exchanges than were sold during the presale:

“Of course, the team sold nothing — since their tokens are locked, but the ecosystem coins were definitely dumped on the market. In the name of transparency, disclose how you used 800 million XPL”

In his post, Fex specifically emphasized that the Plasma team is “focused on creating the monetary system of the future” and will not provide any further comments.

Recall that in September, the stablecoin project announced the launch of the neobank Plasma One with an annual yield of over 10%.