Roughly two months after LAB token briefly minted around 100 paper millionaires, on-chain analytics firm Bubblemaps noted this week that the token's collapse of nearly 99% from its peak has wiped that paper wealth out entirely, coinciding with a scheduled presale claim date that added fresh selling pressure to an already battered market. LAB set its all-time high of $27.22 on June 2, and by early July it had fallen under $2 — an 85% single-day crash on July 8 alone that erased billions of dollars in nominal value.
The token's descent didn't happen in a vacuum. Onchain investigator ZachXBT began flagging red flags in May, alleging that insiders controlled more than 95% of LAB's supply through treasury holdings, exchange-linked addresses and private OTC arrangements, and that a market maker had helped engineer a pump toward a $6 billion fully diluted valuation before the token's crash began in earnest.
How the Pump Was Allegedly Built
According to ZachXBT's investigation, wallets linked to the LAB team deposited 96 million tokens into Bitget accounts shortly before the token's initial surge, while roughly 226 million LAB accumulated in Bitget-linked addresses between March and April sat dormant until the moment was right. The investigation also flagged OTC loans carrying 7.5% monthly interest with a default clause that converted unpaid balances into LAB tokens at market price — a structure that effectively let lenders force a sale into the open market regardless of what happened to the price in the interim.
Presale Claims Added the Final Leg Down
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The most recent leg of the decline traces to a scheduled claim date for early presale participants, who became eligible to unlock and sell their allocations just as the token's price had already been ground down by months of insider-linked selling pressure. For the roughly 100 holders whose paper balances briefly qualified as seven-figure fortunes near LAB's peak, the claim window arrived too late to salvage much of that value — a familiar pattern in tokens where insider concentration and vesting schedules interact badly with a price that has already collapsed — a dynamic that has also shaped sentiment in other altcoins struggling to hold their dollar-denominated value this year.
ZachXBT has since posted a bounty targeting LAB founder Vova Sadkov for documentation of the alleged market-making arrangement, and has publicly called on exchanges including Binance, Bitget and Gate to freeze insider profits or delist the token outright. None of the three exchanges had taken that step as of this week, leaving LAB trading, thinly, on the same venues where much of the alleged manipulation is said to have originated.
