Movement Labs, once valued in market chatter at $3 billion and reportedly seeking a $100 million Series B, has entered bankruptcy proceedings.
On July 15, 2026, the Delaware bankruptcy court received a Chapter 11 filing from MVMT Labs, the entity identified as Movement Labs. The filing shows the company has between $100,000 and $500,000 in assets, liabilities of up to $10 million, and no more than 299 creditors.
At the top of the creditor list is Rushi Manche, the project’s ousted co-founder. He is listed with more than $1.6 million in unsecured claims and still holds 34.25% of the company’s equity.
That leaves Movement with an unusual bankruptcy picture: the person it owes the most money to is one of the founders it pushed out.
How Movement became one of crypto’s breakout projects
Movement Labs was founded in 2022 by Cooper Scanlon and Rushi Manche, both in their early twenties at the time. Its pitch was straightforward and compelling for crypto investors: bring the Move programming language into the Ethereum ecosystem. Move originated from Diem, Meta’s failed stablecoin effort, giving the project a narrative investors quickly embraced.
Funding followed at speed. Movement raised $3.4 million in a pre-seed round in 2023, then closed a $38 million Series A in April 2024 led by Polychain Capital, bringing total funding to about $41.4 million. In January 2025, Fortune reported that the company was preparing a $100 million Series B at a $3 billion valuation.
The project also picked up political visibility. World Liberty Financial, the Trump family-backed crypto venture, bought and publicly supported the MOVE token. During that period, Movement sat at the intersection of several hot themes at once: Move, Layer 2, institutional capital, and a White House-adjacent trade.
On Dec. 9, 2024, MOVE was listed on Binance, marking the high point of the project’s rise.
The sell-off started the next day
The unraveling began almost immediately.
According to the source text, wallets linked to market maker Web3Port started selling 66 million MOVE the day after the Binance listing. That amounted to about 5% of total supply and generated roughly $38 million in proceeds. The token price fell after the sales.
A CoinDesk investigation published in April 2025 brought more detail to light. The token flow ran through an intermediary called Rentech, an entity the article describes as having had little prior digital footprint. Contract documents showed Rentech playing two roles in the same transaction: it appeared as an agent for the Movement Foundation on one side, while also signing on behalf of a Web3Port subsidiary on the other.
The source article says legal counsel for the foundation reviewed the arrangement and described it as "possibly the worst agreement" they had seen, yet it was still signed.
One clause drew particular attention. If MOVE reached a $5 billion valuation, Web3Port could liquidate tokens and split the profits 50-50 with the foundation. The article cites analysts who read that provision as effectively writing a pump-and-distribute incentive into the contract, with the foundation sharing in the proceeds.
Cointelegraph and other outlets, according to the article, reported that Singapore finance figure Galen Law-Kun was the operator behind Rentech. Rentech denied making any false representations.
Exchange action, buybacks, and leadership fallout
Once the controversy became public, the responses came in quick succession.
Binance banned the account tied to the market maker. Coinbase suspended MOVE trading on May 15, 2025, saying the token no longer met its listing standards. The Movement Foundation then cut ties with Rentech and launched a $38 million USDT buyback plan in an effort to stabilize the market.
The symmetry was hard to miss: about $38 million was taken out through selling, and the project later committed the same amount to buying tokens back.
Management turmoil followed. Manche was first suspended and then fired, with the company accusing him of signing an undisclosed agreement. He responded in July 2025 by suing his former company in the Delaware Court of Chancery and won advancement for legal fees. The article says those fees were directly tied to a U.S. Department of Justice grand jury investigation concerning the issuance of the MOVE token.
That legal-fee obligation is presented in the article as the likely source of Manche’s more than $1.6 million claim.
Development shifted to Move Industries
Core development was later moved to a new entity, Move Industries, led by Torab Torabi. The project’s direction also changed. Instead of an Ethereum Layer 2, it turned toward a sovereign Layer 1 focused on cross-border payments and stablecoin settlement in emerging markets.
The article says Move Industries claimed access to licensed payment infrastructure in the United States, Canada, and the European Union. Even so, the strategic pivot did not bring back investor confidence.
Bankruptcy does not end the network story
After news of the filing emerged, MOVE traded around $0.0108, according to the source text. Compared with the token’s price range near the time of listing, the article describes the decline in terms that suggest near-total collapse.
Torabi wrote on X that Move Industries and MVMT Labs are separate legal entities, and that chain development and operations remain normal. In his words, "we continue building."
The timeline is short. One day passed between the Binance listing and the market maker sell-off. About a week separated the public fallout from the suspension of a founder. Nineteen months took the project from breakout status to a Chapter 11 filing.
There was no hack in this collapse. No rug pull was alleged in the article, and no lost private keys. The account presented here is that Movement was brought down by an internally signed contract that remained in force even after legal review raised serious concerns. Bankruptcy can dispose of the less than $500,000 left on the balance sheet. The larger questions around governance and contract controls remain unresolved.