The market maker uses the same set of formulas: compressing the circulating supply, creating a sense of scarcity, synchronizing FOMO across multiple platforms, and gradually distributing at high prices.

Written by: Mahe, Foresight News

What concept does a token with a market value of 5.8 billion dollars represent? It surpasses the booming public chains NEAR and TON. Moreover, this token reached an extremely exaggerated maximum return of 13,750 times, almost mocking all altcoin returns from this cycle, 2021, and even 2017.

The name of the token is LAB, a multi-chain trading terminal project that supports multi-chain trading of spot, limit orders, and perpetual contracts, featuring AI-driven analytical tools. In October 2025, LAB announced the completion of a 5 million dollar financing round, with investments 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.

A 5.8 billion market cap, supported by less than 10 million in liquidity

Screenshot data shows that currently, LAB's 5.8 billion dollar market value is supported by less than 10 million dollars in liquidity, which means the price is completely illusory.

In traditional finance, this is equivalent to a publicly listed company with a market value of 50 billion yuan having an average daily trading volume of less than 80 million yuan. This is a typical "manipulated stock" characteristic, where the market maker can raise or lower the price at will.

More critically, there are only 20,000 wallet addresses holding the coins. By comparison, well-established projects in the same market cap range typically have active on-chain addresses numbering in the hundreds of thousands to over a million. The existence of only 20,000 addresses indicates that the tokens are highly concentrated in a very small number of wallets, showing a very high level of control by the market maker.

Furthermore, most LAB tokens have not yet been unlocked. In the future, new tokens will continuously flood the market at regular intervals, creating sustained selling pressure. The market maker may still hold a large amount of unlocked tokens; the current rise is essentially "pre-pricing" the future unlock.

Wealth screenshots on Twitter have recently begun to circulate widely. An account named Irenezhao shared that they have over 1.11 million LAB in pre-sale that have not been unlocked, currently worth 110 million. Additionally, some accounts have pre-sales ranging from tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand, valued at over 10 million dollars.

In early May, on-chain detective ZachXBT announced a reward of 10,000 dollars for evidence of market manipulation related to LAB and then published a lengthy article exposing various dark practices of the LAB project and its founders.

Publicly available data shows that the team was founded by Vova Sadkov and Mark. Currently, LAB's circulating supply data is chaotic, with Coingecko and CMC reporting different circulating supplies, and the official team has not clearly disclosed transparent token distribution. The investment parties and trading platforms have a high degree of overlap, and most critically: insiders likely control over 95% of the tokens, leaving retail investors completely unaware of the true circulating situation.

Additionally, the LAB team unilaterally extended the public sale lock-up period from 3 months to 9 months, while also defaulting on marketing expenses, providing special treatment to KOLs and whales, and requesting promotional posts. The founders have mixed project funds with personal accounts, with large amounts of money directly entering the exchange recharge addresses. Insiders can sell off tokens while retail investors remain completely unaware.

The price trend of the LAB token is just one ripple among many manipulators.

In April this year, RAVE surged and then plummeted over 90%. The token RIVER soared from 0.05 dollars to 106 dollars, then at one point crashed back to 0.05 dollars, and is now only 5 dollars. Another token, SIREN, was named by ZachXBT as having "highly suspicious price behavior" around April 2026. The concentration of supply + coordination of CEX lifting the price is highly consistent with the LAB model.

This model of "low circulation + high FDV" has become the norm in the crypto market over the past two years. Project teams lock a large number of tokens while releasing a small amount of circulating supply, combined with market makers lifting prices on exchanges, creating a massive illusion of market value. What retail investors see as a "hundred billion market cap" may have less than 1% of tokens actually available for trading. Once the unlock schedule approaches or the market maker decides to exit, the price lacks support and will only fall freely.

Precedents in traditional finance

If you think this kind of play is an original creation of the crypto circle, then you underestimate Wall Street's imagination.

On July 15, 2022, AMTD Digital, a comprehensive platform company under the AMTD Group focusing on "digital finance + media + lifestyle," went public on the New York Stock Exchange at an issuance price of 7.8 dollars, with a total of 185 million shares, but only a maximum of 18.4 million shares were available for trading, accounting for about 10%. The controlling shareholder AMTD Group held a staggering 88.7%, making the truly freely tradable tokens extremely scarce on the market.

In the 13 trading days following its IPO, the stock price skyrocketed from 7.8 dollars to 2,555.30 dollars, an increase of 327 times, with the market cap once reaching 470 billion dollars, surpassing Alibaba at the time (approximately 245.3 billion dollars) and second only to TSMC. On August 2, the stock price surged another 126% in a single day, but the trading volume was only 472 million dollars, with a turnover rate of only 2.19%.

Some analysts calculated that it would take 2.262 billion dollars to raise Alibaba's stock price by 3.35%, while it only took 472 million dollars to raise AMTD Digital's stock price by 126%.

This "leveraging a small amount of money to move a large market cap" magic is based on the principle that the circulating supply is locked up. Short-selling institutions cannot effectively short the stock due to the extreme scarcity of shares available to borrow (less than 0.1% of the circulating supply), with annualized shorting costs as high as 900%. The market maker does not need much real capital to draw a vertical parabolic line on the K-line.

But illusions are ultimately just illusions. On August 3, 2022, AMTD Digital's stock price at one point rose another 20%, and then turned sharply to collapse, with an intraday peak decline of 41%, triggering the circuit breaker mechanism, closing at 1,100 dollars, dropping 34.48% in a single day. Afterward, the stock price continued to decline, falling to around 63 dollars by early September, evaporating 97.5% from its peak. Currently, its latest stock price is only 1.87 dollars.

When the profit-taking concentrates and liquidity black holes instantly swallow everything.

The story of the LAB token is yet another on-chain reenactment of liquidity illusion. From AMTD Digital in the U.S. stock market in 2022 to RAVE and LAB in the crypto market in 2026, market makers are using the same set of formulas: compressing the circulating supply, creating a sense of scarcity, synchronizing FOMO across multiple platforms, and gradually distributing at high prices.

The difference is that the US stock market has the SEC for post-facto accountability, a circuit breaker mechanism, and short-selling institutions for checks and balances, whereas on-chain, there is nothing.