The hundredfold demon coin LAB is approaching zero, a review of the entire trading process

Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

On July 14, the once-hyped hundredfold token LAB welcomed its first unlocking day after the crash. The price settled around $0.40, down approximately 98.5% from the spot high of $27.48 over a month ago.

According to CoinAnk, based on volume-weighted estimates, the average cost of positions entered in the last 60 days is about $3.33, with only 5.56% of the chips still in profit. Early participants who entered at a presale cost of $0.025 still have paper profits of several times, even after experiencing this collapse.

A token that once had a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $14 billion went from peak to collapse in just five weeks. A review of the entire process reveals that this crash may have had its script written even before the launch.

The Founder’s Second Token Launch

LAB is positioned as a multi-chain trading terminal, focusing on AI trading narratives, co-founded by Vova Sadkov and Mark X.

According to public reports, Sadkov had entrepreneurial exit experiences in the EduTech and MedTech fields before entering the crypto industry. In early 2024, he frequently appeared on industry podcasts as the founder of Eesee, discussing how gamified trading could bring millions of users into Web3.

Eesee launched its token ESE on the Blast chain in April 2024. According to RootData, just two months later, in June 2024, Sadkov began working at LAB, during which he also served as a co-founder of Memes Lab. Reports indicate that Eesee subsequently halted development, with the entire team shifting to new projects, and the price of ESE continued to decline, leaving investors stranded.

Eesee's angel investor Simon Dedic publicly called for selling LAB on May 10 this year. He stated that the same group of founders had just issued ESE a year ago, and the K-line chart trends spoke for themselves, indicating that investors' interests had been harmed. It is hard to call the behavior of founders who quickly abandon a project to start the next round of value extraction worthy of investment.

He revealed that he had previously invested in Eesee as an angel, and that project's investors were similarly deceived, with ownership terms modified on the eve of TGE, and temporary refunds issued to maximize the play of low circulation and high FDV. He even asserted that LAB is a giant scam in the making, hoping someone could profit and exit before getting burned.

RootData data shows that co-founder Mark X has now been listed as having left the company. According to an investigation by ZachXBT, this person had been soliciting OTC buyers for LAB in public Telegram groups since January.

However, this history did not prevent LAB from securing luxurious financing. According to RootData, on October 9, 2025, just five days before TGE, LAB completed a $5 million financing round, with investors including Lemniscap, OKX Ventures, GSR, Animoca Brands, Amber Group, Cypher Capital, KuCoin Ventures, Gate Ventures, MEXC Ventures, Selini Capital, TVM Ventures, Presto, Re7 Capital, and RedBeard VC, totaling fourteen institutions.

Among them, OKX Ventures, KuCoin Ventures, Gate Ventures, and MEXC Ventures are all exchange investment departments, and these exchanges later listed LAB for trading.

On-chain Stockpiling Before the Surge

On October 14, 2025, LAB was exclusively launched as the 40th TGE on Binance Wallet, with Gate discovering spot trading on the same day. According to Bubblemaps, the previous presale was only open to 313 participants, raising a total of $1.43 million.

After its launch, LAB was not particularly eye-catching. In December, it briefly fell to a low of $0.074, and for several months, the price remained below $1. During this period, the team maintained an official narrative of buybacks and deflation. According to Lookonchain monitoring, the team repurchased over 20.9 million LAB from Binance Alpha, Bitget, and PancakeSwap in October 2025, valued at about $2.35 million.

During the quiet period, on-chain stockpiling was quietly happening. According to tracking by ZachXBT, between March and April 2026, multiple addresses cumulatively deposited over 226 million LAB into Bitget, distributed across five wallets, each holding 30 to 60 million LAB, with related gas supply addresses concentrated on April 23.

The timing arrived in early May. On May 2, LAB announced that its mobile app was about to launch, a product promised in the TGE roadmap. On the day the news was announced, the price surged by 161.7% to $1.80, reaching $2.20 during the session, with a 24-hour trading volume increasing more than 12 times. The market did not stop there, with a cumulative increase of over 500% within five days, and FDV rapidly expanding to the $6 billion level.

However, the market generally believed that the announcement of a mobile app launch was not enough to drive this round of market activity. According to Coinglass, from May 3 to 4, LAB's daily trading volume reached as high as $6 to $8 billion, while the total open contracts across the network were only $100 million to $300 million, with a trading volume to open interest ratio exceeding 25 times, far higher than the normal range of 3 to 8 times for tokens.

Quadrupling Amid Negative Investigations

On May 14, on-chain investigator ZachXBT released a lengthy investigation estimating that insiders controlled over 95% of LAB's supply.

The investigation pointed out that the LAB project team had not disclosed a clear and complete token allocation plan, and there were discrepancies in the circulating supply data displayed on different third-party platforms.

Since January, co-founder Mark had been soliciting OTC buyers in public Telegram groups, with price quotes including discounts ranging from 40% to 80%, with the 80% discount tier requiring the transferee to post multiple times in support of the project before unlocking.

Image source: ZachXBT

Additionally, a draft loan agreement from the BVI shell company The Lab Management Ltd showed that Sadkov signed a loan agreement with a monthly interest of 7.5% as a director, with default terms stipulating repayment in LAB at market price, and the borrower's wallet on the contract was the same address that previously executed public buybacks.

The investigation also revealed that the lock-up period for participants in the public sale was unilaterally extended from three months to nine months by the team, and participants were only informed of the change via email. Based on the TGE timeline, the expiration date for the nine-month lock-up fell precisely in mid-July. As a result, these participants completely missed the entire surge from May to June, and by the time of unlocking, they were left with the remnants after the crash.

However, the market's reaction to this investigation was unexpected. LAB only retraced about 10% after the release, and then continued to rise, with spot prices reaching as high as $27 in early June, and contract aggregated prices peaking around $19, quadrupling since the investigation was published.

A $10,000 Can Move the Market, Hedgers Get Squeezed

This detailed investigation pointing to a scam did not break the price, which is directly related to LAB's market structure.

According to Coinglass data, during the surge in May, LAB's open contracts remained at a high level of $400 million to $700 million, while spot trading could not support an equivalent volume. Pricing power almost entirely fell into the contract market, while the spot market was too thin to withstand pressure.

Data shows that from June 1 to 3, LAB's open contracts peaked at about $820 million before plummeting to $200 million to $400 million, while the price remained high, and the available shorts for liquidation were nearly exhausted. In late June, LAB reached new highs again on significantly thinner positions.

Notably, Simon Dedic warned on May 31. At that time, LAB had doubled within a week, with FDV reaching $8.6 billion, and he observed that liquidity on PancakeSwap was so thin that a $10,000 buy order could push the price up by more than 70%.

He suspected that dubious market makers were drawing in retail investors to take over and then withdrawing liquidity, suggesting that such operations on this scale could only be achieved with the cooperation of centralized exchanges, as sustained price increases would require fee-free accounts; otherwise, the costs would be unbearable.

He also specifically named Gate, KuCoin, and Bitget, criticizing these leading platforms for facilitating such activities for short-term revenue, harming their own industry position.

In this surge frenzy, professional players attempting to bet on a decline were systematically squeezed. The DeFi protocol PiggyBank stated that it had purchased $102,500 worth of locked LAB through an OTC intermediary at about an 80% discount in early May. While acquiring the spot at a low price, it opened an equivalent short position in the perpetual contract market.

This is a common arbitrage practice, where the spot and short positions offset each other, and the profit comes from the buying discount plus the funding rate in the perpetual market.

The problem arose with the funding rate. Perpetual contracts rely on funding rates to pull contract prices towards spot prices. When the spot is continuously maintained above the contract, the short side must continuously pay the long side.

PiggyBank pointed out that LAB's spot price was artificially capped at a high level, with rates once compressed to an annualized negative 17,000%, equivalent to about negative 2% per hour. As a result, their short positions were bleeding every hour they held, and the hedge completely lost its economic meaning.

PiggyBank was ultimately forced to close its short position at around $9, incurring a loss of $476,000. The act of closing the short position itself was equivalent to buying, adding fuel to the rise, and thereafter LAB surged to $27.

This supposedly stable arbitrage ultimately transmitted losses to PiggyBank's three product lines, including those nominally belonging to low-risk stablecoin vault depositors. Subsequently, PiggyBank could only compensate the affected users.

Ninety Percent Drop in 48 Hours

On July 3, LAB sharply fell to around $5.7 before violently rebounding, returning above $16 on July 6, with open contracts expanding back to $350 million. This was the last push before the crash.

From July 6 to 8, LAB dropped from about $17 to around $1.25 within 48 hours, a decline of nearly 90%, evaporating over $5 billion in market value. The liquidation wave concentrated in Binance's perpetual market; notably, Binance only offered LAB perpetual contracts and did not list spot trading.

The project team responded by stating that the team did not sell, and the selling pressure came from large external market participants and independent trading firms, while also announcing the destruction of 1% of tokens, with the roadmap unchanged.

However, according to on-chain data tracking, from July 10 to 11, an entity initially funded by the LAB team deposited 18.4 million LAB, approximately $18.3 million, into Aster and sold it on-chain, causing the price to drop another 54% to $0.55. This entity had previously received over 196 million LAB from the team in April.

The sell-off continued, and the exit path became more concealed. According to tracking information, on July 13, the same entity withdrew 17.9 million LAB, approximately $7.2 million, from Bitget, which was then re-deposited into KuCoin, and shortly after, 5 million of those were transferred out, again sold on the spot through Aster, causing the price to drop about 35%, from $0.34 to $0.22. ZachXBT believes this entity modified its on-chain fingerprints after his last disclosure to cover up the source of funds.

The promise of destruction was indeed fulfilled. On July 14, LAB's official statement claimed that it had completed the buyback of a total of 22.683 million LAB, accounting for 7.27% of the circulating supply, directly removing it from the open market. At the same time, the largest scale of destruction to date was completed, reducing the total supply from 1 billion to 990 million, and the price rebounded to around $0.40 after the destruction.

Unclear Circulating Supply

Looking back, a more fundamental question arises: as of now, the LAB project team has not disclosed a clear and complete token allocation plan, and there are discrepancies in the circulating supply data displayed on different third-party platforms.

Previously, most media referred to July 14 as LAB's first unlocking, but the CoinLaunch page shows that the monthly release of investor shares began in April.

Currently, the allocation plan tracked by CoinLaunch covers both investor and airdrop shares, with another 708 million marked as data unavailable.

Regarding holdings allocation, according to RootData's entity labeling data, the identifiable holdings total about 12 million LAB, less than 4% of the circulating supply, with Gate alone holding 11.8 million. The mainstream market maker Wintermute holds only 7,084 LAB, valued at about $2,000.

ZachXBT pointed out in the investigation that the team knew the unlocking time, market makers knew their positions, and OTC buyers knew their lock-up periods, seemingly everyone had private information, while retail investors could only see the price.

After the Warnings Failed

In this crash, the limitations of on-chain investigations were also exposed. ZachXBT warned from May to July, but ultimately did not stop anyone. KOL Crypto Weituo criticized that every time he publicly denounced token manipulation, the actual effect was to attract more shorts into the market, providing fuel for the manipulators' liquidations.

This assertion was validated in PiggyBank's losses, as the address cluster marked in May corresponded precisely to the Aster sell-off in July, making this the most powerful on-chain verification of its investigation.

It is worth noting that LAB is not an isolated case. ZachXBT pointed out that the same set of tactics had previously been used on a series of tokens including RAVE, RIVER, SIREN, MYX, and SKYAI. The skeletons of these cases are highly similar: low circulation, coordinated wallet accumulation, deployment on the BNB chain, entering the contract market via Binance Alpha, and then using leverage liquidation to complete the harvest, with the only difference being the pace of manipulation.

Some would first create a seemingly topping sideways market to lure shorts in, then use negative funding rates to force them to liquidate, like MYX. Others would take advantage of extremely thin circulation to surge from launch to peak in one go, like COAI. LAB followed the former, with an additional layer of AI trading narrative as a story shell for the surge. In other words, this is not a failed project, but a repeatedly validated, replicable extraction model.

A larger issue points to the exchanges. Large-scale detection of manipulation is indeed difficult, and freezing assets without judicial documents lacks basis, but the halo of Alpha listings, exposure on hot lists, and perpetual contract pipelines together created a false sense of security for this asset.

The anger of retail investors largely falls here. While Simon Dedic criticized market makers, he pointed the finger directly at the platforms that cooperated in allowing these activities. Some community users also pointed out that typically, exchanges would issue warnings and confiscate related profits if they discovered project manipulation, but the fact that LAB's manipulation could continue for so long raises doubts that the platform is also a beneficiary.

A more general sentiment is that the market neutrality touted by exchanges has become an invisible harvest for retail investors in the face of obvious control, and the so-called listing review now appears more like empty talk in hindsight.