1/ Recently, a Coindesk article came out describing my early...
Sam Thapaliya@sam_thapaliya
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Aug 19, 2026
~3 min read
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1/ Recently, a Coindesk article came out describing my early involvement in Movement. The purpose of this thread is to set the record straight.
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2/ Prior to Movement’s formation, I met Cooper in-person at Vanderbilt and offered to incubate a project using Move that led to the creation of Satay, a yield aggregator that I financially supported and helped get off the ground.
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3/ When Cooper pivoted to start MVMT Labs (before Rushi was on the team), he depended on my advice and support for all kinds of things –from fundraising to tokenomics to emotional support–I worked very close with Cooper to jumpstart Movement.
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4/ When Rushi joined the Movement to head up the technical team, the vision started to really blossom. I took a step back from my role as a close advisor to Cooper and was predominantly focused on the GTM efforts. This resulted in the MOU posted by @vannacharma, which was negotiated and signed by Cooper. As the project got closer to TGE, I started working closely with Cooper again, especially advising him on the upcoming proposed airdrop.
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5/ Cooper commissioned me to find a data science team to audit the proposed airdrop dataset based on the testnet usage after the Movement team realized that the dataset that they were relying on did not even accurately reflect the testnet usage.
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6/ Because of the many issues with the dataset, I suggested to Cooper that the rewards for all airdrop participants be flattened out. Throughout this period, Cooper was very adamant on a particular set of 75000 wallets receiving the highest percentage share of token per wallet.
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7/ You can find these wallets at move-token-tracker.vercel.app and observe the distribution below as they were almost the only ones who claimed and were able to bundle and sell 60 Million+ $MOVE during the December 9 Airdrop of Move token. You can see in the below heatmap how these wallets were bundled after claiming the airdrop and then dumped:
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8/ During the claim process, when we realized the problem with the 75,000 wallets, I suggested again that we flatten the reward to lessen the impact of Sybils bundling and dumping. Instead, Cooper chose to increase the claim fee, which resulted in no other users besides these 75,000 wallets with a spike on rewards claiming the airdrop.
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9/ Cooper then adjusted the claim fee after the airdrop had already started, but he did not proportionally increase the claim fee on the 75,000 “core-galxe” wallets to control for sybil behaviour.
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10/ Once users couldn’t claim, as fees were higher than the airdrop amount, this made the majority of users defer and wait to claim the airdrop on the L2 where fees are waived.
The problem is that the L2 did not launch in 30 days as planned, leaving many users hanging.
The problem is that the L2 did not launch in 30 days as planned, leaving many users hanging.
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11/ The narrative that has emerged is wrong. Cooper had asked me for help nearly 3 years ago and I dedicated a good chunk of my life to helping Cooper, Rushi, and the team make MVMT a great success. In return, I was publicly attacked, and lost many opportunities and social capital.
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12/ I devoted a lot of time and energy in the last 3 years of my life to help jumpstart MVMT. As of now, I have not been paid anything and apparently MVMT has no intention of honoring its agreement and giving me tokens for my work.