 |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Cryptocurrency, financial services |
| Founded | 2022 |
| Founder | Andrei Grachev |
| Headquarters | Dubai , United Arab Emirates |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Heng Yu Lee, Lingling Jiang |
| Parent | Digital Wave Finance |
| Website | www |
DWF Labs is a private company involved in trading, market making, and investing in cryptocurrency, based in Dubai. [1]
DWF Labs was founded in 2022 by a Russian entrepreneur Andrei Grachev as the client-facing affiliate Digital Wave Finance (DWF), a high-frequency trading firm registered in Switzerland. [2]
DWF Labs provides market making and liquidity services, over-the-counter (OTC) trading, options, and venture capital funding to blockchain projects, and trades on numerous centralized and decentralized exchanges. [3]
According to an investigation by The Block, Digital Wave Finance built a wide market-making business across major centralized crypto exchanges during the late 2010s, while associated brands such as VRM Trade ran OTC and liquidity products aimed at institutional clients. [2]
In 2023, Financial Times named DWF Labs a lead investor in the Series A funding round of a blockchain project called CryptoGPT. [4]
The company participated in the Industry Recovery Initiative (IRI), 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. [5]
After Telegram founder Pavel Durov was arrested in France in 2024, DWF Labs spent "millions" to buy Toncoin, a native cryptocurrency of the TON blockchain, a project closely tied with Telegram, after its price crashed. [6]
In April 2025, DWF Labs announced investing $25 million in World Liberty Financial, a DeFi protocol founded by Alex and Zach Witkoffs, alongside Donald Trump’s family members. [7]
In November 2025, 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. [8]
Binance Research named DWF Labs the top lead VC investor on the crypto market between Q3 2022 and Q3 2023. [9]
Notable investments include TON [10] , EOS [11] , and World Liberty Financial.
In 2023, DWF Labs became a liquidity provider for TRON. [12]
Reuters listed DWF Labs among "heavyweight crypto investors" participating in the deals of forming digital asset treasuries at public companies in the United States. [13]
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. [14] One of Binance's largest VIP clients, DWF Labs has been reported to trade billions of dollars in volume per month on the platform. According to the report, DWF Labs conducted over $300 million in wash trades and manipulated the prices of the Yield Guild Games (YGG) token, and at least six other cryptocurrencies, activity that would violate Binance’s terms of service.
Binance later responded to the report, stating 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. [15] 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. The crypto exchange denied any wrongdoing.
DWF Labs has also denied the allegations of market manipulation. Company's founding partner, Heng Yu Lee, characterized the claims as “competitor-driven FUD” and said the firm’s trading activity complied with exchange rules. [16] Before the Wall Street Journal report was published, Andrei Grachev had emphasized that DWF Labs is “not involved in any manipulation” and that its role is to provide liquidity and support for blockchain projects rather than to move prices artificially. [17]
Rival crypto market makers have publicly criticized 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 behavior in other cases.