Recently, the crypto community has been hotly discussing the situation with RAVE Project. It turns out that on April 13, the token price surged sharply from $0.3 to $6.2 — a 20-fold jump. It sounds like a classic pump, but it's interesting to see what’s behind it.

According to Coinglass, during this movement, positions worth over $37 million were liquidated. Most of them were short positions, meaning people betting on a decline got caught in the liquidation. The community is quite confident that this was price manipulation. The project allegedly used futures contracts to profit, and it is expected that they made over $30 million from this operation.

Who is behind this? The RAVE team consists of people who previously worked at ARPA and Bella Protocol. The leaders are Syu Maotun (Felix Xu) and Yemu. Felix Xu is an interesting character — in 2021, he raised the crypto fund ZX Squared Capital with $20 million, which specializes in quantum trading. This fund is probably funding RAVE’s active market making.

From the project’s perspective — it’s a very clever scheme. They are self-funded, control liquidity, minimize trust risks, and avoid typical mistakes of young projects. Everything is aimed at maximizing profit. But reputation is suffering. Yemu and Felix Xu clearly knew what they were doing, but whether this is legal trading strategy or manipulation — that’s a question for regulators.

Interestingly, RAVE is now trading at $1.19, down 14% in a day. Obviously, the hype has passed, and the project has returned to reality. A story that serves as a warning for those considering investing in new projects with low liquidity.