Most Influential: Rushi Manche

Before Rushi Manche’s ousting from Movement Labs, the crypto infrastructure startup he co-founded with fellow Vanderbilt University dropout Cooper Scanlon, he was a rising young star in the DeFi world.

This feature is a part of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2025 list.

But in April 2025, the buzzy project became embroiled in a scandal over hidden market-making deals connected to MOVE’s token launch. Internal documents obtained by CoinDesk showed that Movement Labs, under Manche’s leadership, had signed a contentious contract with a little-known intermediary firm, Rentech, which served simultaneously as a supposed subsidiary of the listed market-maker Web3Port and as an agent for the project. That structure gave Rentech control over roughly 66 million MOVE tokens —about 5% of the total supply —which were rapidly dumped on the market.

The dumping immediately caused a sharp collapse in MOVE’s price and widespread investor backlash. As scrutiny intensified, major exchanges, including Coinbase, either suspended or delisted the token. A few days after the initial scandal was revealed, Movement Labs suspended Manche pending a third-party governance review. After that, it didn’t take long for the company to announce Manche’s firing.

The scandal led to a leadership shake-up, reputational damage for the project, and a steep fall in token value. But beyond that, it fueled industry-wide anxiety about opaque token allocations and insider trading risks, prompting exchanges, investors and regulators to intensify scrutiny of early-stage token deals across the crypto sector.