ZachXBT alleges 95% insider control of LAB token in investigation into AI terminal's $6 billion FDV project

Blockchain investigator ZachXBT published an investigation into LAB on Thursday, alleging that insiders control more than 95% of the AI trading terminal's token supply and coordinated with an unknown market maker to engineer a pump to a $6 billion fully diluted valuation.

According to the onchain sleuth's thread, the protocol’s suspicious choices left retail participants holding a position in a token whose float, ownership, and supply schedule they cannot meaningfully verify.

ZackXBT’s LAB file

The investigation builds on a $10,000 bounty ZachXBT posted earlier this month, and lays out what he calls "everything wrong with the current meta of retail extraction on major centralized exchanges."

LAB was founded by Vova Sadkov and a co-founder identified as Mark, with the token generation event in October 2025.

Backers include Lemniscap, OKX, Animoca, GSR, Gate, Kucoin, Mirana, and Amber, several of which are also exchanges where the token trades. No consistent float data is publicly available, ZachXBT noted. Analytics providers like Coingecko, RootData, and CoinMarketCap each report different figures, and LAB's own documentation provides no breakdown.

Eesee, a prior project by Sadkov and Mark, also left investors feeling abandoned after the team moved on, according to the investigator.

On the loan side, ZachXBT identified a private contract carrying a 7.5% monthly rate for six months, signed by Sadkov on behalf of The Lab Management Ltd., a BVI-registered shell. By default, repayment is due in LAB tokens at market price.

The borrower wallet from that contract is the same address used for LAB's public buybacks, linked on-chain to a separate loan on Wildcat.

Funds tied to LAB have flowed to what ZachXBT identified as Sadkov's personal exchange accounts on Bybit and Gate, the same accounts that received deposits tied to Eesee before LAB existed. The unilateral changes to public sale terms add a further layer, the researcher stated.

LAB’s team changed certain participants' cliff from three months to nine months without their consent, ZachXBT wrote, while other creators have reported waiting months for marketing campaign payouts with no clarification from the team.

A hidden supply?

There’s also allegedly a hidden supply that lives in the OTC structure.

From January 2026, co-founder Mark solicited OTC buyers in a public Telegram group. A WhatsApp pitch document offered loans at 5% monthly, OTC at a 60% discount with a five-month cliff, and a guaranteed 25% discount tranche recalculated monthly.

The most recent offering — a KOL capital pitch — sat at an 80% discount, with 50% unlocking August 14 and the balance September 15, on the condition KOLs post promotional content multiple times before unlock or be blacklisted. OTC discounts have widened as the token's price has climbed.

ZachXBT claims the market maker operation traces back to Bitget, too. Between March and April 2026, insiders deposited 226 million LAB to Bitget addresses, where the tokens sat dormant until approximately 100 million LAB was withdrawn within the past several days.

From May 11 to 12, nearly 100 million LAB — worth approximately $482 million — moved from Bitget to 10 addresses ZachXBT identified in the thread. He assessed an unknown market maker operating through Chinese exchanges as likely running a coordinated playbook previously deployed across RIVER, RAVE, SIREN, MYX, and SKYAI, with Bitget as the primary venue and Binance and Gate as secondary channels.

A signer on several LAB team multisigs was funded by an insider ZachXBT linked on-chain to the RIVER manipulation, the same insider who received more than $12 million in RIVER tokens to two centralized exchange deposit addresses.

ZachXBT urged Bitget, Binance, and Gate to freeze insider profits and redistribute them to users, or delist without waiting for public pressure. He added he has paid $1,500 of the $10,000 bounty out of pocket.

Reaction

The thread drew immediate reaction. One commenter noted that Bitget had untagged itself from the thread after being named.

Another pushed back on the investigation's premise entirely. "You are just bringing more attention than these coins ever had before," wrote one user, who argued that anyone trading LAB knows they are gambling, and that the exposure from ZachXBT generates liquidity rather than deterrence.

ZachXBT's closing caveat directly addressed the latter, noting that the finding shouldn’t be confused as a recommendation to short, because the level of supply control in insider hands could be used to drive the price higher against any short position.