On-chain sleuth ZachXBT has accused the founder of LAB of running centralized exchange manipulation schemes that he says “harm retail investors,” after a private warning DM was read and ignored
Summary
- On-chain investigator ZachXBT has accused the founder of LAB of participating in centralized exchange (CEX) market manipulation that he says hurts retail traders.
- ZachXBT said he attempted to contact the founder privately, but his message was read and ignored, calling the conduct a further blow to the industry’s already fragile credibility.
- The allegation lands amid a broader wave of on‑chain investigations into insider trading, wash trading, and market‑making schemes around thinly traded tokens.
ZachXBT alleged in a new post on X that the founder of LAB has been “posting philosophical nonsense while participating in market manipulation on CEXs that harms retail investors.” He added that he had tried to reach out privately but that “the DM was read and not replied to,” before concluding that “this scammer further undermined the last remaining credibility of the industry,” according to his thread.
While ZachXBT did not share the full on‑chain traces in that single post, the allegation comes just days after other monitoring accounts highlighted suspicious trading around LAB. A recent MEXC briefing noted that a wallet “suspected of being an insider or market maker” realized an estimated $1.13 million profit after LAB’s price surged 10x in a month, with its pre‑pump positioning and post‑spike selling pattern raising “serious questions about market fairness in the cryptocurrency space.”
The LAB accusation fits a pattern in ZachXBT’s work. In a separate investigation last month, he accused RaveDAO of being at least aware of who manipulated its RAVE token during an 11,000% pump and crash, pointing to transfers from a token‑distribution wallet into Bitget deposit addresses that coincided with a 40% intraday drop. RaveDAO denied team involvement, but ZachXBT argued that given supply concentration and the origin of the funds, “the team at minimum knows who is responsible for this price action,” as summarized in a Binance Square recap.
These kinds of allegations are increasingly shaping how traders view new listings on centralized venues. A Reddit round‑up of ZachXBT’s earlier Tokenlon probe highlighted analysis suggesting that 57–60% of that DEX’s volume in 2022–2023 touched wallets later tied to fraud networks, with flows ultimately ending up on CEXs—fueling a perception that parts of the exchange ecosystem are intertwined with tainted flows and manufactured liquidity.
For token prices, this kind of reputational shock usually translates into higher volatility and thinner liquidity as some traders exit while others try to fade or front‑run the news. Crypto.news has documented similar dynamics before: one story on a DeFi token that collapsed after manipulation claims, another report on how repeated CEX listing scandals have nudged capital toward on‑chain venues, and an analysis detailing how alleged whale wash trading on centralized exchanges distorts price discovery.
If the LAB founder does not publicly address the accusations or provide a verifiable rebuttal, the most likely near‑term outcome is a discount on LAB’s valuation relative to fundamentals, persistent sell pressure on any CEX where it trades, and yet another incremental erosion of trust in small‑cap listings—a drag that inevitably bleeds into broader market sentiment.
