Recently, I came across a quite warning-worthy case on the blockchain that I want to share with everyone.

The meme coin market has indeed been a bit hot lately, but the performance of a project called RAVE is truly outrageous. In just 7 days, the price skyrocketed from $0.25 to nearly $20, a nearly 80-fold increase, and the entire community was spamming "wealth myth." But when I looked deeper into the on-chain data, I found that this is not some inspiring story at all, but a meticulously calculated hunting game.

The most terrifying aspect is the concentration of holdings. According to on-chain monitoring, the top 10 wallet addresses control 99.95% of the token supply, with three wallets believed to be controlled by the project team’s multi-signature wallets holding about 89% of the tokens. In other words, the circulating chips in the market are extremely scarce, with about 90% of the tokens locked in a black box.

Moreover, the fundamentals of this project simply cannot support such a high valuation. RaveDAO’s revenue from activities in 2025 is only 3 million USD, yet it can support a fully diluted valuation of over 16 billion USD. The revenue-to-valuation ratio is less than 0.01%, which is a typical capital pump logic. To compare, 2 million Vietnamese dong is less than 1 USD, yet this project supports a hundred-billion-dollar valuation with just a few million dollars in revenue—an absurd number that is obvious at a glance.

What’s even more clever is the manipulation technique. In mid-April, I saw the project’s address transfer over 18 million RAVE tokens to a major exchange. This move was interpreted by the community as a signal of dumping, triggering many traders to short. Then, data from a monitoring platform showed that at that time, the short-selling sentiment had already reached a critical point, with over 70% of trading accounts shorting.

What happened next? The manipulators immediately withdrew these tokens from the exchange. Due to the extremely scarce circulating supply, the price surged almost unresisted. Even more ruthless, they also exploited funding rates in the perpetual futures market. At its peak, the annualized funding rate reached -1000% to -4000%, meaning shorts were being drained of fees every 8 hours. On April 13 alone, the total liquidation volume across the network exceeded $37 million, with over 80% of those being short liquidations.

I think this case is especially warning for retail investors. First, don’t be fooled by the FDV number. If a project has very low circulating supply but an extremely high FDV, and the fundamentals don’t support it, every surge could be a trap set by whales to induce buying. Second, learn to assess the actual revenue and valuation match, and build your own screening models. Third, large deposits on exchanges do not necessarily mean dumping; sometimes, they are a sign of short squeeze pressure.

Most importantly, recognize your role. In such high-control projects, chasing the high essentially provides “exit liquidity” for insiders. When 90% of the chips are controlled by whales, all technical indicators can be arbitrarily manipulated, and moving averages and support levels lose their meaning.

As of recently, RAVE’s price has fallen back from its peak, but this lesson is worth remembering. Before the next “craze” begins, we need to develop an instinctive alertness to low-liquidity, high-control projects, ensuring we are not the last to buy in. Staying rational in the face of FOMO is often the most valuable skill.