The token behind LAB Trade, an AI trading terminal, has lost roughly 97% of its value and dropped out of the 150 largest crypto assets after sitting inside the top 20 only days earlier. The collapse followed months of public warnings from on-chain investigator ZachXBT, who says the selling pressure traces back to wallets the founding team funded.
At its intraday peak, LAB changed hands near $13.79 and carried a fully diluted valuation approaching $14 billion, according to reporting from Crypto Times. By July 12, most of that paper wealth was gone. The token now trades near single digits below its former range, with a market capitalization that has fallen to a fraction of its high. Bitcoin was trading around $63,889 as of July 12, down 0.4% on the day, and the Fear and Greed Index sat at 31, so the broader market was not in a risk-on mood when LAB unwound.
The on-chain trail
ZachXBT's central claim is that insiders controlled more than 95% of LAB's effective float through private allocations and over-the-counter deals, leaving the freely traded supply far thinner than the market cap suggested. His posts documented tens of millions of dollars in LAB tokens moving into exchange deposit addresses shortly before price spikes, the kind of pattern that lets holders sell into engineered demand.
The latest development, reported by CryptoPotato, connects the largest waves of selling to wallets that the team itself had funded. That link matters because it reframes the crash from an ordinary market rout into something closer to an orderly exit by insiders. When the entities dumping the token are the same entities that seeded the wallets doing the dumping, retail buyers are on the other side of a trade they could not see.
ZachXBT's earlier work on LAB flagged private loan contracts carrying rates as high as 7.5% a month, and he alleged the team altered vesting cliffs from three months to nine without holder consent. Late changes to a vesting schedule can obscure who is able to sell and when, which makes independent verification of a token's real circulating supply harder for outside analysts.
A supply overhang still ahead
The damage may not be finished. A large token unlock was scheduled for mid-July, releasing roughly 27 million LAB tokens into an already fragile order book. Unlocks add sell-side supply regardless of price, and in a market where liquidity has already thinned, even a small share of that release hitting exchanges can push the price lower. Traders who bought the dip are exposed to that overhang.
LAB's founders, identified in reporting as Vova Sadkov and a co-founder named Mark, have issued no public rebuttal to the allegations. Silence is not proof of anything, but for a project whose value rested on trust in an insider-heavy cap table, the absence of a documented, wallet-by-wallet response leaves the on-chain narrative unchallenged.
Reading the pattern
This episode rhymes with a recurring structure in token launches: a concentrated insider float, a fast run-up, and a distribution phase where early holders sell into thin retail demand. The specifics differ each time, but the mechanics are familiar to anyone who followed the BonkDAO treasury drain or the enforcement cases that regulators have opened against pooled crypto schemes.
For everyday users, the practical takeaway sits upstream of price charts. A token's market capitalization is only meaningful if the float behind it is genuinely liquid and widely held. When one party controls most of the supply, the quoted price is a number that a small group can move at will. Checking supply concentration, vesting terms, and who funded the top wallets is tedious, but it is exactly the work that separated the people who exited LAB early from the people holding it at a 97% loss.
None of this is investment advice. It is a description of what on-chain records and third-party reporting show at the time of writing, and the figures around LAB are still moving.
Overview
LAB, the token behind the LAB Trade terminal, has fallen about 97% and slipped out of the top 150 crypto assets after ZachXBT tied heavy selling to team-funded wallets and warned that insiders held more than 95% of the effective float. A mid-July unlock of roughly 27 million tokens threatens further downside, and the founders have not publicly rebutted the claims.
