Fall of 91.66%: The explosive LABUBU has caught the attention of the crypto world.

In the crypto world, "everything can be a coin," and the recently targeted IP is the hot LABUBU.

Beijing Business Daily reporters noticed that the globally popular LABUBU once topped the hot search rankings, but what many people don't know is that there is a homonymous altcoin that also took advantage of the hype to cash in, called LABUBU币, which was launched on May 29. On the day it was listed, the coin price skyrocketed, but within a few days, it rapidly plummeted, with a maximum drop of 91.66%.

Source: Coinmarketcap

The recent simple and brutal rise and fall also means that many speculators in the crypto world were caught at the peak. Industry insiders believe that such altcoins carry extremely high risks and are essentially just a game of speculation, so investors should be highly vigilant about the associated risks.

01 Avalanche's LABUBU coin

As we all know, LABUBU has become a global sensation. Not only has the "抢LABUBU" topic trended on Weibo's hot search in domestic social media platforms, but also in overseas locations like the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Japan, consumers have been seen queuing all night at Pop Mart stores to grab them.

LABUBU is a trendy toy IP under Pop Mart, and this "elf" is loved by fans worldwide for its unique shape. It is no surprise that this hot topic has once again caught the attention of the crypto world. On June 9, Beijing Business reporter noted that riding on the "wind" of LABUBU's explosive popularity, a virtual coin named "LABUBU" has recently drawn attention and has been listed on several exchanges, experiencing an impressive surge in the early stages, but soon faced a price pullback.

Coinmarketcap information shows that LABUBU coin was launched on May 29, 2025, as a Memecoin (short for meme coin). It was not officially released by Pop Mart, but rather launched by a group of community-driven developers. In terms of price, it rose to $0.004559 on the day of launch, but quickly dropped within two days, falling to as low as $0.0003801, with a maximum decline of 91.66%. As of around 20:28 on June 9, the latest price of LABUBU coin is $0.0007612.

Industry insiders believe that the launch of LABUBU coin is a typical speculative behavior in the crypto world, and its huge price fluctuations also reflect the extremely high investment risks behind it.

As pointed out by Yu Jianing, co-chairman of the Blockchain Special Committee of the China Communications Industry Association and director of the Hong Kong Registered Digital Asset Analysts Association, LABUBU coin is not issued by the IP owner or relevant authorized institutions, nor does it reflect any substantive connection with the original IP in terms of business, content, or branding. It is more about quickly capturing market sentiment, utilizing LABUBU's attention among the trendy consumer group and the breadth of social communication to attract liquidity and create trading enthusiasm. From a motivational perspective, this type of coin is not based on product development, technical routes, or financial service positioning, but rather focuses on speculative demand, with short-term goals centered on the cash flow brought by price fluctuations.

According to Coinmarketcap data, as of now, the maximum supply of LABUBU coin has reached 1 billion, with a market value of approximately $799,522.48. It can be anticipated that behind this round of simple and brutal rise and fall of LABUBU coin, many speculators in the crypto world have also been harvested at the peak.

Yu Jianing told a reporter from Beijing Business Today that after experiencing a significant price increase in a short period, the price rapidly fell, and the price trend is consistent with the characteristics of a quick decline after liquidity accumulation.

Specifically, the initial price increase was mainly driven by a small concentration of funds and low circulation volume, lacking sustained buying support and real demand. As the market gradually formed a perception of the project's lack of fundamental expectations, early holders began to cash out and take profits, leading to a downward trend. Assets that lack transparency in both pricing logic and circulation mechanisms are more prone to form drastic irrational price movements amid emotional fluctuations, exposing retail investors to extremely high price risk.

"The price of LABUBU coin completely relies on market sentiment and speculation, lacking real asset support and intrinsic value. Once market sentiment fluctuates, a sharp drop can occur," said Shen Xiayi, deputy director of the Federal Securities Research Institute.

02 The Chaos of Backdoor Meme Coins

Industry insiders believe that the performance of LABUBU coin also reveals the chaos in the meme coin market: a large number of unauthorized, unmanaged, and undeveloped meme coins attract attention by leveraging hot topics, and then use exchange listings and social media to drive up prices. However, they fundamentally lack issuance norms and market access standards, which also leads to highly frequent speculative behavior.

It is worth mentioning that the crypto world has been taking advantage of IP popularity to launch coins, which is no longer a new phenomenon. Previously, a meme coin themed around the frog meme, PEPE, experienced a rapid surge and fall in price, attracting a lot of investor attention. In addition, there are also Naruto coin themed around the anime "Naruto" and Mickey coin themed around Disney characters. These meme coins often leverage the recognition and influence of popular IPs to attract speculators to participate in speculation.

"The reason why such phenomena continue to occur and frequently attract market participation lies in retail investors' expectations for short-term gains, which far exceed their judgments on the sustainability of the projects themselves." Yu Jianing told Beijing Business News that the spread of meme coins mainly relies on social platforms, using memes, meme culture, and screenshots of short-term price increases to disseminate informal information, leading many investors to enter trades before fully understanding the core information of the project mechanisms, forming a speculative structure that substitutes price behavior for fundamentals.

It is important to note that for ordinary investors, participating in such investments often means extremely high risk. From the perspective of the volatility of meme coins, their price fluctuations are often influenced by market sentiment, speculation, and other factors, lacking real value support. In addition, the meme coin market also has risks such as fraud and manipulation, making the safety of investors' funds difficult to guarantee.

"In this process, project parties typically amplify price fluctuations by locking a small amount of liquidity and concentrating control over the initial holdings, realizing cashing out after a short-term price increase, while the main downside risk is often borne by participants who lack recognition ability. In other words, the rise of Meme coins is often concentrated in a few time periods and holders, while the losses during price declines are borne by a broader base of ordinary traders," said Yu Jianing.

"The token market is already highly uncertain, and the regulation is not perfect enough, not to mention that this kind of token is very different from the cryptocurrency based on the blockchain-based logic, and almost all traders are going for the purpose of short-term arbitrage, which has formed a short-term trading behavior of beating the drum and passing the flowers, and the sharp rise and fall has almost become inevitable." Shen Xiayi believes that investors must see the essence through the phenomenon, and need to see the asset attributes and intrinsic value behind the token, so as to avoid participating in token projects without real assets or trading scenarios, and avoid causing investment losses.

03 Centralized exchanges should be held accountable

In fact, the chaos behind such meme coins goes far beyond this. In addition to leveraging IP popularity to issue coins, Beijing Business Daily reporters have learned that many projects in the market attract investors through false advertising, price manipulation, and other means, but the latter often ends up losing everything.

"It is precisely because of the high degree of disintermediation and anonymity of the issuance process of Meme coins that it is currently difficult at the governance level." Yu Jianing bluntly said that regulators do not have systematic capabilities for the identification, tracking and enforcement of on-chain assets, and community governance and platform self-discipline lack mandatory binding force, so that a large number of short-term projects can complete a round of funding operations without intervention. The core of management difficulty is not whether malicious behaviors can be identified, but the current lack of technical and institutional mechanisms to substantively restrict the source and circulation path of the project.

For the management of such chaos, Yu Jianing believes that the key lies in whether centralized exchanges can bear more adequate pre-review and in-process supervision responsibilities. The centralized platform has complete account data and transaction behavior records, and has the technical ability to identify suspicious transaction behaviors. For situations such as large fluctuations in initial prices in a short period of time, trading concentration in a small number of addresses, and obvious asymmetry between orders and orders, the platform shall have an automatic identification mechanism and trigger measures such as delayed trading, temporary price limit or disclosure reminder. In addition, projects that lack basic materials, have vague information, or are suspected of being misleading should not be arranged online.

When it comes to chaos governance, Wang Jingxuan, a researcher at the Federal Reserve Securities Research Institute, said that first of all, it is necessary to improve the relevant laws and regulations of virtual currencies as soon as possible, clarify the essential attributes of related businesses, and provide a legal basis for supervision; On this basis, it is necessary to strictly enforce market access, manage the business entities of virtual currencies, prohibit relevant enterprises from conducting business and publicity outside of supervision, and restrict the development of relevant illegal activities from the source; Secondly, in the field of law enforcement, it is necessary to strictly enforce the law on transactions outside the relevant norms, and in the process, it is necessary to use digital technology to monitor transactions in the virtual currency market and investigate and deal with illegal acts, and impose heavy fines on non-compliant institutions and individuals, so as to maintain market fairness and order.

Finally, we must continue to strengthen investor education, expand publicity and educational activities on a broader scale, popularize basic knowledge in related fields, enhance industry self-discipline, leverage the power of industry associations to resist illegal trading, strengthen technical prevention and control, and quickly introduce national standards to regulate industry development.