The obvious reason for those chips being missing is because they are being mined with. It's funny the way none of you FUDsters can come up with a logical argument against this.
It might be good to stop this "black and white" thinking.
There are several nuances between "Labcoin is not hashing at all" and "Labcoin mines on a large scale". They say they are at an experimental stage, they say they are hashing and optimizing and we also know they are not yet on a productional scale.
I'm not claiming they're mining on a large scale, I'm just saying that the most plausible scenario for removing chips from the tray is to mine with those chips, After all, that's what they're designed for.
They could be demonstration chips.. it could just be a big tray and not enough chips on hand to fill it.
You're just making blind guesses that have very little value..