Wintermute Trading, the large crypto market maker, withdrew more than 8 million ARKM tokens from Binance, underscoring its major role in Arkham Intelligence’s controversial new dox-to-earn platform designed to unmask anonymous crypto users.
Those five Wednesday transactions, totaling $3.7 million of ARKM, increased Wintermute’s position by more than 731%, according to blockchain analytics firm Nansen.
The Arkham Intel Exchange incentivizes people to figure out who is behind otherwise-anonymous crypto wallets, paying out bounties in the ARKM token. Wintermute’s accumulation of ARKM potentially makes them a bigger player in providing liquidity in that ecosystem.
“It’s super unlikely Wintermute is actually buying the token to hold it [as an investment]. Two potential possibilities are that they are either market-making with those tokens or doing some sort of [over-the-counter] deal they’re helping to facilitate,” said “Paul,” a core contributor for crypto options trading protocol Lyra.
After the transactions, Wintemute became the 10th-largest holder of ARKM. The token has slid 5.6% in the past 24 hours to just under 47 cents.
ARKM debuted on July 18 at 75 cents, and the day before, Wintemute received about 15 million tokens from the Arkham Intelligence Multisig wallet, which makes sense for market making, according to Paul.
“You generally want to distribute to market makers prior to lauch so you launch with deep markets, otherwise the token price would be super volatile,” Paul said.
Representatives of Arkham Intelligence did not respond to a CoinDesk request for comment by press time. Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said to CoinDesk over X (formerly Twitter) that he couldn’t provide any comment.