LAB allegedly used private OTC discounts, influencer deals, and coordinated exchange activity to support price growth, ZachXBT claimed in investigations.
Crypto investigator ZachXBT has accused the team behind LAB of using opaque OTC deals, insider-controlled supply, coordinated market-making activity, and hidden unlock structures to drive the token’s recent rise to a nearly $6 billion fully diluted valuation.
In his latest post on X, ZachXBT claimed LAB represents “everything wrong” with the current centralized exchange token environment, where retail investors allegedly have little visibility into token allocations and insider agreements. The LAB token crashed by over 30% in 24 hours.
LAB Faces Fresh Scrutiny
According to the investigator, LAB was launched in October 2025 by Vova Sadkov and Mark after their previous project, Eesee (ESE), reportedly left many investors dissatisfied once the team moved on. He explained that there is still no clear public breakdown of LAB’s token distribution, as CoinGecko, RootData, and CoinMarketCap all display different circulating supply figures, while LAB’s own documents reportedly provide no detailed allocation data.
ZachXBT said his on-chain analysis indicates insiders likely control more than 95% of the token supply. He also alleged that the LAB team unilaterally changed vesting conditions for Legion public sale participants from a three-month cliff to a nine-month cliff, as he cited an email screenshot shared by a user.
Separate complaints from creators who claimed they were still waiting for marketing payouts months later were also mentioned in the findings. ZachXBT also shared details from a draft private loan contract tied to The Lab Management Ltd., a British Virgin Islands company allegedly connected to Vladimir Sadkov.
The agreement reportedly offered loans with 7.5% monthly interest over six months, with repayment in LAB tokens at market price in the event of default. The wallet connected to the contract was allegedly later used for public LAB buybacks and linked on-chain to another wallet involved in a separate Wildcat loan.
Hidden OTC Deals and Insider Activity
ZachXBT also claimed LAB-related funds were sent to exchange accounts allegedly linked to Sadkov, which had earlier received deposits connected to Eesee. The investigator even went on to allege that several OTC and loan arrangements had been privately offered since January 2026.
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According to screenshots and claims shared in the post, some deals included 60% discounted OTC allocations with lockups, guaranteed discount structures recalculated monthly, and influencer-focused allocations with discounts reaching as high as 80%. Some agreements purportedly required influencers to publicly support LAB before their tokens unlocked.
These hidden arrangements created supply risks that retail traders could not track publicly, according to ZachXBT. He also linked one signer associated with LAB multisig wallets to an insider believed to be connected to earlier RIVER token manipulation activity.
As per the findings, insiders deposited 226 million LAB tokens into Bitget-linked addresses between March and April 2026 before roughly 100 million LAB tokens were withdrawn between May 11 and 12 to ten separate wallets. ZachXBT said most LAB spot activity appeared concentrated on Bitget, while Binance and Gate were also used for derivatives and Alpha markets. He called on exchanges including Bitget, Binance, and Gate to freeze alleged insider profits or delist the token altogether.
ZachXBT had raised similar concerns around the SIREN token earlier this year after the asset surged from around $0.40 on March 10 to an all-time high of $3.65 by March 22 before eventually collapsing to $0.53.
