Bitget CEO Gracy Chen posted a bullish pitch this week for UEX, the exchange’s new product offering retail traders access to global assets like pre-IPO stocks and precious metals. The sell was straightforward: the old era of chasing memes is over, and serious money deserves serious tools.
Then ZachXBT showed up in the replies.
Charts from Gracy Chen’s X post showing price action of TRUMP, Melania, AIXBT, Bome, Floki, and Wif — tokens she cited as examples of the meme cycle traders should move past.
The Pitch Retail Was Supposed to Celebrate
X user @0xtonixie had already laid out the case for Bitget Prime IPO before Chen quoted the post. The argument was clean: firms like OpenAI and SpaceX captured most of their value before ordinary buyers ever got a look in. Venture capital gates, accredited investor thresholds, and minimum ticket sizes have historically kept retail out of the best early deals. Prime IPO, the post said, changes that. The first batch featuring SpaceX was cited as generating close to 30% returns in a month, or more than 300% annualised.
Chen built on that framing directly. In her own post, she wrote that her personal allocation has shifted toward U.S. stocks, precious metals, and pre-IPO positions, with some stablecoins kept on the side earning yield. She said the era of running after the next hot keyword has run its course.
For a retail crypto trader who has watched meme tokens implode repeatedly, that pitch lands. The promise of touching SpaceX or OpenAI economics without needing a Silicon Valley network is the kind of offer worth examining. But one question followed Chen’s post that the retweet count could not drown out.
What ZachXBT Actually Said
On-chain investigator ZachXBT, who does not work for any exchange or institution, responded directly under the thread. The reply was short. It was also specific.
“You forgot to mention Bitget allows sketchy active market makers to defraud retail users with supply control manipulation schemes that end up like the left image while saying you’ll investigate without providing updates to the community (RAVE, RIVER, SIREN, LAB, etc). Thanks to Gracy Chen for understanding.”
As ZachXBT posted on X, the tokens he listed, RAVE, RIVER, SIREN and LAB, are not hypothetical examples. Each was flagged by his investigations as carrying signs of coordinated supply control. RAVE alone saw $30.6 million in derivatives liquidations within 24 hours after the alleged manipulation surfaced, according to data tracked at the time of the collapse, placing it behind only Bitcoin and Ethereum in single-day liquidation volume.
Bitget’s Prime IPO markets screen showing preOPAI, preSPAX, AMDON, CRWDon and other TradFi-linked tokens listed at the time of Gracy Chen’s post.
One Month. No Update.
X account @VietnamPenguin noted under ZachXBT’s reply that today marks exactly one month since Chen’s public promise of a RAVE investigation. The exchange has not issued a public compliance update on the case. ZachXBT’s own reply to that observation was brief: “We do not despise them enough.”
The RAVE case carried significant detail when ZachXBT first filed it in April. Wallets tied to the RaveDAO deployer transferred 18.58 million RAVE tokens to Bitget before the price moved, per on-chain data reviewed at the time. No announcement preceded those deposits. Ten hours later the rally started. With the majority of Binance traders holding short positions at that point, 29.78 million tokens were then pulled back out of Bitget, draining sell pressure from the order book entirely. RAVE ran from around $0.27 to above $14 across seven days, a move exceeding 5,500%.
Chen had confirmed the investigation publicly within hours of ZachXBT’s original post. That was a month ago.
The Gap Between the Story and the Data
The tension here is not about whether Bitget Prime IPO is a useful product. Pre-IPO access for retail is a legitimate financial innovation and the preSPAX listing on the screen, up 7.27% at the time of Chen’s post, is the kind of return that gets attention. The issue is what happens when the exchange’s retail-protection narrative runs directly into documented retail losses on the same platform.
Bitget open interest across its derivatives products stood at significant levels during the RAVE collapse, per exchange data at the time, with retail short sellers bearing most of the liquidation damage when the supply-controlled squeeze played out. The pattern ZachXBT named, insider wallets pre-loading an exchange, withdrawing quietly to drain sell pressure, then watching the short squeeze trigger, is not unique to RAVE. He listed RIVER, SIREN and LAB as carrying similar structures.
LAB brought a separate confrontation. ZachXBT posted a $10,000 bounty seeking documentation including market-maker contracts and insider communications tied to LAB trading on Bitget spot. He later escalated publicly, stating that Shawn Liu, whom he named as Bitget’s actual operational head, was allowing such schemes to operate while Chen served as the public face.
What Retail Actually Needs to Know
The Prime IPO product is real. The returns cited by @0xtonixie on SpaceX, close to 30% over a month, are real numbers. But the same exchange listing those assets has an open investigation into at least one token where retail traders absorbed outsized losses from what on-chain evidence suggests was coordinated supply manipulation.
Chen’s framing that “true alpha” comes from patient, quality asset allocation is not wrong as a general investment thesis. The charts she referenced in her post, TRUMP, Melania, AIXBT, Bome, Floki, Wif, are textbook examples of vertical spike followed by near-total erasure. Anyone who bought near those peaks is sitting on losses that no amount of pre-IPO exposure can offset.
But ZachXBT’s counter is equally grounded. If the same platform promoting quality assets also hosts the conditions that produced RAVE’s 5,500% pump and subsequent collapse, the promise of a better deal for retail needs more than a product announcement to stand on. It needs a compliance update that has been overdue, by the community’s count, for exactly one month.
