Wintermute Trading, a large crypto market maker, recently withdrew more than 8 million ARKM tokens from Binance, highlighting its major role in Arkham Intelligence’s dox-to-earn platform. According to blockchain analytics firm Nansen, the five Wednesday transactions totaled $3.7 million of ARKM, increasing Wintermute’s position by more than 731%.
The Arkham Intel Exchange incentivizes people to uncover the identities of anonymous crypto users, rewarding them with ARKM tokens. Wintermute’s accumulation of ARKM tokens could make them a major player in providing liquidity in that ecosystem. “It’s super unlikely Wintermute is actually buying the token to hold it [as an investment],” said Paul, a core contributor for crypto options trading protocol Lyra. “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.”
After the transactions, Wintemute became the 10th-largest holder of ARKM. The token has dropped 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 launch 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. Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy said to CoinDesk over X (formerly Twitter) that he couldn’t provide any comment.