DWF Labs
DWF Labs is a private company involved in trading, market making, and investing in cryptocurrency, based in Dubai.
History
DWF Labs founded in 2022 by Russian entrepreneur Andrei Grachev as the client-facing affiliate of high-frequency trading firm Digital Wave Finance, the company is headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It provides liquidity services, over-the-counter trading, options and token investment deals to blockchain projects, and trades on numerous centralized and decentralized exchanges.DWF Labs is closely linked to Digital Wave Finance, a high-frequency cryptocurrency trading firm founded in Switzerland in 2018. According to an investigation by ChainCatcher, Digital Wave Finance built a wide market-making business across major centralized exchanges during the late 2010s, while associated brands such as VRM Trade ran OTC and liquidity products aimed at institutional clients.
In 2023, Financial Times named DWF Labs a lead investor in the Series A funding round of a blockchain project called CryptoGPT.
The company participated in the Industry Recovery Initiative, a fund established in 2022 by Binance to finance promising startups affected by the crash of the FTX crypto exchange; DWF Labs initially committed $15 million to the IRI.
In 2025, DWF Labs invested $25 million in World Liberty Financial. Later, DWF Labs launched its own investment fund in the DeFi segment with a volume of $75 million. The fund focuses on supporting projects that operate on Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, and Base blockchains. The fund invests in companies that solve structural problems of DeFi, particularly in the areas of liquidity, clearing, lending, and on-chain risk management.
Criticism and controversies
In 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that Binance’s internal market-surveillance team had investigated DWF Labs after complaints from other market maker firms and concluded that the firm engaged in extensive wash trading and other price-manipulation practices on the exchange in 2023. DWF Labs is one of the largest VIP clients of cryptocurrency exchange Binance and has been reported to trade billions of dollars in volume per month on the platform. According to the report, the team alleged that DWF Labs conducted over US$300 million in wash trades and manipulated the prices of Yield Guild Games and at least six other tokens, behaviour that would violate Binance’s terms of service.Binance later said it had found “insufficient evidence” of market abuse by DWF Labs and argued that some self-trading could have been accidental or related to hedging strategies. The investigation also found examples of DWF Labs selling tokens its founder had promoted causing a crash in those token's price, which is consistent with a pump and dump scheme, and is against Binance's terms of service. In response to this report, Binance fired the members of internal investigators team and retained DWF Labs as a client, saying that the self trading could have been accidental and that the internal team collaborated too closely with one of DWF's competitors. Binance has denied any wrongdoing.
DWF Labs has denied the allegations of market manipulation. In an interview with DL News, founding partner Heng Yu Lee characterised the claims as “competitor-driven FUD” and said the firm’s trading activity complied with exchange rules. Grachev has also stated that the company “is not involved in any manipulation” and that its role is to provide liquidity and support for token projects rather than to move prices artificially.
Rival market makers have publicly criticised DWF Labs’ practices. Executives at firms such as GSR and Wintermute have questioned why the company is invited to industry panels and have accused it of presenting trading activity as long-term investment, while themselves denying allegations of similar behaviour in other cases.