Whales are using the same playbook: compress the floating supply, create a sense of scarcity, synchronize FOMO across multiple platforms, and slowly distribute at high levels.
Author: Ma He, Foresight News
What does it mean for an unknown token to have a $5.8 billion market cap? It surpasses the popular public chains NEAR and TON. Moreover, the token's maximum return reached an absurd 13,750x, almost mocking all altcoin returns from this cycle, 2021, and even 2017.
The token is named LAB, a multi-chain trading terminal project that supports spot, limit orders, and perpetual contracts across multiple chains, with a focus on AI-driven analytical tools. In October 2025, LAB announced the completion of a $5 million financing round, with participation from Selini Capital, Re7 Capital, Cypher Capital, RedBeard VC, Lemniscap, TVM Ventures, OKX Ventures, Mirana, KuCoin Ventures, Gate Ventures, GSR, Animoca Brands, Presto Labs, and others.
$5.8B Market Cap Backed by Less Than $1M Liquidity Pool
Screenshot data shows that LAB's current $5.8B market cap is supported by a liquidity pool of less than $1M, meaning the price is completely artificial.
In traditional finance, this is equivalent to a listed company with a 50 billion RMB market cap having a daily average turnover of less than 80 million RMB—this is a typical feature of a "whale-controlled stock," where whales can pump or dump the price as they wish.
More crucially, there are only 20,000 token-holding addresses. For comparison: legitimate projects in the same market cap range usually have hundreds of thousands to millions of on-chain active addresses. 20,000 addresses indicate that the tokens are highly concentrated in a very small number of wallets, with extreme whale control over the market.
Furthermore, most LAB tokens are still locked. In the future, new tokens will enter the market at intervals, creating continuous selling pressure. Whales may still hold a large number of unlocked tokens; the current pump is essentially "pre-pricing" for future unlocks.
Wealth screenshots on Twitter have also been circulating widely recently. The account Irenezhao posted yesterday that they have over 1.11 million LAB tokens still locked, currently worth 110 million. In addition, some other accounts have pre-sale holdings ranging from tens of thousands to over 100,000 tokens, worth more than $10 million.
In early May, on-chain detective ZachXBT announced a $10,000 reward for evidence of market manipulation related to LAB, then published a long article exposing various scandals about the LAB project and its founders.
Public data shows that the team was founded by Vova Sadkov and Mark. Currently, LAB's circulating supply data is chaotic—Coingecko and CMC report different figures. The official has not clearly disclosed the token distribution. Investors and trading platforms are highly overlapping. Most crucially: insiders likely control over 95% of the tokens, and retail investors have no idea about the real circulating supply.
Furthermore, the LAB team unilaterally changed the public sale lock-up period from 3 months to 9 months, while defaulting on marketing fees, giving special treatment to KOLs and whales and requiring them to post promotions. The founders commingled project funds with personal accounts, and a large amount of funds directly entered exchange deposit addresses. Insiders can sell without retail investors knowing at all.
LAB's token price movement is just one ripple among many manipulators.
In April this year, RAVE soared then plummeted over 90%. The token RIVER surged from $0.05 to $106, then once dropped back to $0.05, with the current price only $5. Another token, SIREN, was named by ZachXBT around April 2026 as having "highly suspicious price behavior." Concentrated supply + coordinated CEX pumping is highly consistent with the LAB model.
This "low circulation + high FDV" model has become common in the crypto market over the past two years. Projects lock up a large number of tokens, release a small floating supply, and cooperate with market makers to pump on exchanges, creating an illusion of huge market cap. Behind the "10 billion market cap" seen by retail investors, the real tradable tokens may be less than 1%. Once the unlock schedule approaches or whales decide to exit, the price has no support and will only free-fall.
Precedent in Traditional Finance
If you think this play is original to the crypto circle, you underestimate Wall Street's imagination.
On July 15, 2022, AMTD Digital, a "digital finance + media + lifestyle" integrated platform under AMTD Group, IPO'd on the NYSE with an issue price of $7.8. The total share capital is 185 million shares, but the floating shares are at most 18.4 million, accounting for about 10%. The controlling shareholder AMTD Group holds up to 88.7% of the shares, making the truly freely tradable shares in the market extremely scarce.
In the 13 trading days after listing, the stock price soared from $7.8 to $2555.30, a 327x increase, with a market cap once reaching $470 billion—surpassing Alibaba (about $245.3 billion at the time) and second only to TSMC. On August 2, the stock price rose another 126% in a single day, but the turnover was only $472 million, with a turnover rate of only 2.19%.
An analyst calculated at the time: it takes $2.262 billion in turnover to make Alibaba's stock price rise 3.35%, while it only takes $472 million to make AMTD Digital rise 126%.
This magic of "using a tiny amount of capital to leverage a huge market cap" is based on the floating supply being locked. Short-selling institutions cannot short effectively because the number of shares available to borrow is extremely small (less than 0.1% of the floating supply), and the annualized shorting cost is as high as 900%. Whales don't need much real money to draw a vertical parabola on the K-line.
But illusions are after all illusions. On August 3, 2022, AMTD Digital rose another 20% intraday, then turned around and crashed, with a maximum intraday drop of 41%, triggering a circuit breaker. It closed at $1100, a 34.48% drop in a single day. Since then, the stock price has been falling all the way; by early September of that year, it had dropped to around $63, evaporating 97.5% from its peak. Currently, its latest stock price is only $1.87.
When profit-taking is concentrated, the liquidity black hole swallows everything in an instant.
The LAB token story is another on-chain repeat of the liquidity illusion. From AMTD Digital in the U.S. stock market in 2022 to RAVE and LAB in the crypto market in 2026, whales use the same playbook: compress floating supply, create scarcity, synchronize FOMO across multiple platforms, and slowly distribute at high levels.
The difference is that the U.S. stock market has SEC post-event accountability, circuit breakers, and short-selling institutions for checks and balances, but on-chain, there is nothing.