Gotbit

Gotbit

Gotbit operated as a cryptocurrency market-making firm, co-founded by Russian national Aleksei Andriunin. The firm marketed itself to token projects seeking exchange listings and orderly markets, but federal prosecutors allege its core service was manipulating token prices and trading volumes through coordinated wash trading. In October 2024, the US Department of Justice unsealed indictments against Andriunin and two senior executives, charging them with wire fraud and market manipulation — part of a broader sweep called Operation Token Mirrors that also targeted other market makers and token promoters. The SEC filed parallel civil charges. The firm's alleged strategy was straightforward: Gotbit employees would execute coordinated buy and sell orders between accounts they controlled to generate fake trading volume for client tokens. This inflated volume helped tokens qualify for listings on larger exchanges and attracted genuine retail buyers. Prosecutors cited internal communications where executives openly discussed manipulating markets, including one instance where a client asked how to avoid detection on an exchange with tighter surveillance. The response, attributed to Andriunin, advised layering orders through multiple wallets to make the wash trading "look organic." Federal authorities seized over $25 million in cryptocurrency across the cases in Operation Token Mirrors. Andriunin was arrested in Portugal in October 2024 on a US extradition request and later sentenced to eight months in US federal prison after pleading guilty. Fedor Kedrov, the firm's director of market making, and Qawi Jalili, director of sales, were also indicted and remain at large. The firm's known client roster included meme tokens and low-float projects; one named co-conspirator, Vy Pham, founder of Robo Inu, was charged separately for working with Gotbit to manipulate that token's price. Gotbit also maintained a venture investment pool, Gotbit Ventures, and co-hosted promotional events — including a Crypto OG Party at Token2049 with DAO Maker. The Gotbit case is structurally notable because it exposed market making as a vector for systemic manipulation in crypto — not just a fringe activity by anonymous actors but a registered business with named officers, client contracts, and public-facing branding. The indictments followed years of on-chain sleuthing by researchers who had flagged Gotbit-linked wallets conducting suspicious trading patterns as early as 2019. The firm's collapse illustrates how the infrastructure of liquidity provision, when left unregulated, can be repurposed as a tool for securities fraud at scale.