How $LAB Token Lost $250 Million in Eight Hours and What Traders Missed

 


A token called $LAB added $260 million to its market cap in two days. By the time most people noticed, it had already crashed 84%. The price went from under $1 to roughly $3.80, then collapsed to near $0.70 in under eight hours. Both sides of the market paid for it.

Coinglass data from May 2, 2026 put total short liquidations across exchanges at $22.77 million. Binance led with $8.83 million in shorts wiped out. Bybit cleared another $5.09 million. Bitget added $4.12 million. Long liquidations reached $12.05 million on the same day. Traders going in either direction got caught.

The structure behind moves like this one follows a recognizable pattern. Supply gets kept deliberately thin. A price push draws in short sellers. Funding rates flip negative. Spot buying pressure forces short liquidations. More shorts enter, believing the momentum is fading, and get liquidated again. Once enough retail buying comes in on the long side, the original holders start offloading, shorting simultaneously, and collecting from both directions.

On-chain researcher ZachXBT flagged $LAB on May 2 as another insider manipulation scheme on centralized exchanges, grouping it with SkyAI as a recurring type. He said he doesn't have capacity to investigate every incident like this, given his current focus on North Korean threat actors, pig butchering operations, and private key exploits.

What made this particular episode different was the counter-accusation that followed. When AshCrypto posted a detailed breakdown of the $LAB manipulation on May 3, ZachXBT responded by surfacing old data suggesting Ash had run a similar operation on ROYA tokens in 2021, using a wallet tied to his paid Telegram group to sell while publicly telling subscribers to hold.

The full breakdown, including the liquidation data, the step-by-step playbook, and ZachXBT's response to AshCrypto, is covered in detail at CryptoNewsLive.org.

If you trade low-float tokens on centralized exchanges, this story is worth reading before the next one runs.

Visit CryptoNewsLive.org for the full report.

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