$LAB token added $260 million to its market cap across two trading days. Then it lost most of that in eight hours. The price chart tells the story bluntly — a near-vertical climb to roughly $3.80, followed by a collapse that bottomed near $0.70.

Coinglass liquidation data from May 2, 2026 shows the scale of damage. Binance alone recorded $8.83M in short liquidations and $5.23M in longs. Bybit added another $5.09M shorts and $2.71M longs. Bitget wiped $4.12M in shorts, $2.3M in longs. Across all tracked exchanges, total short liquidations hit $22.77 million. Long liquidations reached $12.05 million. Both sides of the trade got hurt.

The Playbook, Spelled Out

On May 3, crypto commentator AshCrypto posted on X calling the move illegal. His post broke down what he described as a deliberate manipulation sequence. According to AshCrypto, on X:

“$LAB token pumped 500% in just 2 days, adding $260 million to its market cap and liquidating $26.6 million in shorts. It then dumped 84% in just 8 hours, wiping out over $250 million and liquidating $17 million in longs.”

He outlined the structure behind it: keep supply float low, let the pump attract shorts, flip funding negative, push spot buying to liquidate those shorts, then repeat the cycle with fresh shorts entering at higher funding rates. Once retail starts believing the pump is permanent, begin offloading supply while simultaneously opening short positions. AshCrypto said the team controlled the majority of $LAB supply.

The same post also carried a sharper comment. AshCrypto on X said market makers and exchanges will keep doing this because retail has largely stopped trading. His words:

“Marketmakers and exchanges are just gonna keep doing this over and over. Retail aren’t trading anymore, so now they are just trying to exit scam.”

ZachXBT Responds, Then Turns the Mirror

The conversation started a day earlier. On May 2, crypto researcher Gerard Dargan asked ZachXBT on X for his thoughts on $LAB. ZachXBT’s response came quickly. According to ZachXBT, on X:

“Obviously another market manipulation scheme on CEXs by insiders. There’s multiple of these scam tokens per month (SkyAI, Lab, etc). Not worth it for people to trade them.”

When user @an321d asked on X whether an investigation would follow, ZachXBT explained his constraints. He wrote on X:

“I do not nearly have time to cover every incident as a single person. I primarily focus my time now on DPRK, home invasion robberies, social engineering threat actors, pig butchering clusters, private key compromise exploits.”

ZachXBT works independently. His focus has shifted toward North Korean threat actors and organized financial crime, not every token spike on a derivatives exchange.

What ZachXBT Said About Ash

The May 3 post by AshCrypto drew a pointed reply. ZachXBT noted on X that AshCrypto, who goes by AshWSB, had run a comparable operation on ROYA tokens on CEXs. The on-chain evidence he cited pointed to a wallet linked on Etherscan that ZachXBT said AshCrypto had shared publicly for payment collection through his paid group.

According to ZachXBT, on X, the sequence went like this: Ash made a public call on ROYA, then hours later posted asking who was selling aggressively, then said publicly he was holding all his ROYA and buying more. The wallet data, per ZachXBT, showed Ash had been the one selling into his own followers during that window.

The Telegram screenshots visible in the ROYA episode show Ash WSB Premium posts from March 12 urging subscribers to hold tight, not sell in panic, and coordinating activity across Twitter to boost the token. The pinned message in that group read: “Are you ready to buy this push coin early?”

ZachXBT’s post did not accuse AshCrypto of involvement in the $LAB move specifically. The point was narrower: someone publicly condemning a manipulation pattern had reportedly used the same one before.

Whether that changes how the $LAB story gets read is a separate question. What the data does show is that short traders lost nearly $23 million in 24 hours on a token whose supply concentration was known. Long traders who bought the move late gave back over $12 million when the price folded. The chart on LABUSDT perpetual shows a candle structure consistent with the playbook Ash described, irrespective of who was doing the describing.