A drop of 91.66%: The popular LABUBU was targeted by the cryptocurrency circle

In the cryptocurrency circle, "everything can be a coin", and the IP that has been targeted recently is the popular LABUBU.

Beijing Business Daily reporters noticed that the globally popular LABUBU once dominated the hot search list, but what many people don't know is that there is a copycat coin with the same name, which also took advantage of the popularity to reap a wave of profits. The coin is called LABUBU coin, which was launched on May 29. The price of the coin soared on the day of listing, but it plummeted rapidly after a few days, with the maximum drop of up to 91.66%.

Source: Coinmarketcap

Behind this round of simple and crude rise and fall, it also means that many speculators in the currency circle have been harvested at high points. Industry insiders believe that such altcoins are extremely risky and are essentially just a hype game. Investors should be highly vigilant about related risks.

01 Avalanche of LABUBU coins

As we all know, LABUBU is popular all over the world. Not only on domestic social platforms, the topic of "grabbing LABUBU" once topped the Weibo hot search, but also overseas, in many places such as the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Japan, consumers lined up all night to grab it.

LABUBU is a trendy IP under Pop Mart. This "elf" is loved by fans all over the world for its unique shape, and it is no surprise that this hot spot has once again been targeted by the currency circle. On June 9, a Beijing Business Daily reporter noticed that riding on the "east wind" of LABUBU's explosion, a virtual currency called "LABUBU" has been paid attention to recently and listed on multiple exchanges. Its initial rise was amazing, but the price soon fell back.

According to Coinmarketcap information, LABUBU coin is a Memecoin (referred to as Meme coin or Meme coin) launched on May 29, 2025. It was not officially released by Pop Mart, but was launched by a group of community-driven developers. In terms of price, the price rose to $0.004559 on the day of its launch, but fell rapidly within two days, once falling to $0.0003801, with the maximum drop of 91.66%. As of around 20:28 on June 9, the latest price of LABUBU coin was $0.0007612.

The industry believes that the launch of LABUBU coin is a typical speculative behavior in the currency circle, and its huge price fluctuations also reflect the extremely high investment risks behind it.

As Yu Jianing, co-chairman of the Blockchain Committee of the China Communications Industry Association and director of the Hong Kong Registered Digital Asset Analysts Association, pointed out, assets such as LABUBU coins are not issued by IP owners or relevant authorized institutions, nor do they reflect any substantial connection with the original IP at the commercial, content or brand level. It is more about quickly capturing market sentiment, that is, using LABUBU's attention and social communication breadth among trendy consumer groups to attract liquidity and create trading heat. From the perspective of motivation, this currency is not based on product development, technical routes or financial service positioning, but is centered on speculative demand, and its short-term goal is to focus on the flow of funds brought about by price fluctuations.

According to Coinmarketcap data, as of now, the maximum supply of LABUBU coins has reached 1 billion, with a market value of approximately US$799,522.48. It is foreseeable that behind the simple and crude rise and fall of LABUBU coin, many speculators in the currency circle were also harvested at the high point.

Yu Jianing told the Beijing Business Daily reporter that its price fell rapidly after a sharp rise in the short term, and the price trend was in line with the characteristics of rapid decline after liquidity accumulation.

Specifically, its initial increase was mainly driven by concentrated intervention of small-scale funds and low circulation, lacking continuous buying and real demand as support. When the market gradually formed the perception that the project lacked fundamental expectations, early chips began to cash in profits and leave the market, resulting in a downward trend. This kind of asset that lacks transparency from pricing logic to circulation mechanism is more likely to form violent irrational price trends in emotional fluctuations, exposing retail investors to extremely high price risk exposure.

"LABUBU coin price is completely dependent on market sentiment and speculation, without real asset support and intrinsic value. Once market sentiment fluctuates, there will be a sharp drop." Shen Xiayi, deputy director of the Lianshuo Securities Research Institute, also said.

02 Meme coin chaos behind

Industry insiders believe that the performance of LABUBU coin also indirectly reveals the chaos in the meme coin market: a large number of unauthorized, ungoverned, and undeveloped meme coins attract attention by borrowing hot spots, and then use exchanges to go online and social diffusion to push up prices, but essentially lack issuance regulations and market access standards, which also makes speculative behavior highly frequent.

It is worth mentioning that it is not new for the currency circle to issue coins by taking advantage of IP popularity. Previously, a meme coin PEPE with the theme of frog emojis appeared in the currency circle. Its price soared and plummeted in a short period of time, attracting the attention of a large number of investors. In addition, there are Naruto coins based on the theme of the anime "Naruto" and Mickey coins based on the theme of Disney animation characters. These meme coins often use the popularity and influence of popular IPs to attract speculators to participate in speculation.

"The reason why this phenomenon continues to appear and frequently obtains market participation is that retail investors' expectations for short-term returns are much higher than their judgment on the sustainability of the project itself." Yu Jianing told the Beijing Business Daily reporter that the spread of meme coins mainly relies on social platforms, and informal information is spread through emojis, meme culture, and short-term increase screenshots, which makes a large number of investors enter transactions before they understand the core information of the project mechanism, forming a speculative structure that replaces fundamentals with price behavior.

It should be noted that for ordinary investors, participating in such investments often means extremely high risks. Judging from the rapid rise and fall of meme coins, their price fluctuations are often affected by market sentiment, speculation and other factors, and lack actual value support. In addition, the meme coin market also has risks such as fraud and manipulation, and the safety of investors' funds is difficult to guarantee.

"In this process, project parties usually amplify price fluctuations by locking up a small amount of liquidity and centrally controlling initial holdings, and realize cash withdrawal after a short-term increase, and in the end, participants who lack identification ability often bear the main downside risks. In other words, the rise of Meme coins is often concentrated in a few time periods and coin holders, while when prices fall, the losses are borne by a wider range of ordinary traders." Yu Jianing said.

"The token market is inherently highly uncertain, and the supervision is not perfect. Moreover, such tokens are very different from cryptocurrencies based on blockchain logic. Almost all traders are rushing for short-term arbitrage purposes, which has formed a short-term trading behavior of passing the parcel, and sharp rises and falls have almost become inevitable." Shen Xiayi believes that investors must see the essence through the phenomenon, and need to penetrate the tokens to see the asset attributes and intrinsic value behind them, avoid participating in token projects without real assets or trading scenarios, and avoid investment losses.

03 Centralized exchanges should be responsible

In fact, the chaos behind such meme coins is far more than this. In addition to issuing coins by riding on the popularity of IP, Beijing Business Daily reporters learned that there are many projects in the market that attract investors to participate through false propaganda, price manipulation and other means, but the latter often end up losing all their money.

"It is precisely because the issuance process of Meme coins is highly decentralized and anonymous that there are great difficulties in governance at the moment." Yu Jianing bluntly stated that the regulatory authorities do not yet have the systematic capabilities to identify, track and enforce the law on the assets on the chain, and the community governance and platform self-discipline lack mandatory constraints, allowing a large number of short-term projects to complete a round of fund operations without intervention. The core of the management difficulty does not lie in whether malicious behavior can be identified, but in the current lack of technical and institutional mechanisms to substantially constrain the source and circulation path of the project.

For the governance of such chaos, Yu Jianing believes that the key lies in whether centralized exchanges can assume more adequate pre-examination and in-process supervision responsibilities. Centralized platforms have complete account data and transaction behavior records, and have the technical ability to identify suspicious transaction behaviors. For situations such as large price fluctuations in a short period of time in the initial stage, transactions concentrated in a few addresses, and obvious asymmetry of buy and sell orders, the platform should have an automatic identification mechanism and trigger measures such as delayed transactions, temporary price limits or disclosure reminders. In addition, projects that lack basic materials, have ambiguous information or are suspected of misleading should not be put online.

Speaking of chaos governance, Wang Jingxuan, a researcher at the Lianshuo Securities Research Institute, said that first of all, it is necessary to improve the relevant laws and regulations on virtual currency 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 control market access, manage the operating entities of virtual currency, prohibit related companies from conducting business and publicity outside of supervision, and restrict the development of related illegal activities from the source; secondly, in the field of law enforcement, transactions outside relevant regulations must be strictly enforced. In the process, digital technology must be used to monitor transactions in the virtual currency market and investigate illegal activities, and heavy penalties must be imposed on illegal institutions and individuals to maintain market fairness and order.

Finally, we must continue to strengthen investor education, carry out publicity and education activities on a wider scale, popularize basic knowledge in related fields, strengthen industry self-discipline, use the power of industry associations, resist illegal transactions, strengthen technical prevention and control, and introduce national standards as soon as possible to regulate industry development.