Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the darknet marketplace Silk Road, or someone managing his wallet, inadvertently caused the price of ROSS tokens, donated to him, to plummet. This was noted by Arkham.
ROSS ULBRICHT LOST $12M ON PUMPFUN…
Ross Ulbricht, or someone with access to his wallets, just accidentally nuked the price of a pumpfun coin sent to him while trying to provide liquidity on Raydium.
Because he initialized the liquidity pool at the wrong price, $1.5M of the… pic.twitter.com/kN5BN2mN49
— Arkham (@arkham) January 30, 2025
During the initialization of a liquidity pool on the DEX Raydium, the asset was set at an incorrect price. Tokens worth $1.5 million from the PumpFun platform were “instantly intercepted” by an MEV bot and sold into the newly created pool.
The script repeated the operation several times, resulting in total losses of $12 million.
The creators of ROSS sent 50% of the total supply of the meme coin to Ulbricht’s address. The MEV bot sold 80% of these coins for just over $600,000, causing the asset’s price to drop by approximately 90%.
The Silk Road founder still holds 10% of the supply, valued at approximately $200,000, after correctly adding the Raydium Concentrated Liquidity pool.
Back in January, U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned Ulbricht, who had been serving two life sentences.
Coinbase’s Director of Product, Conor Grogan, discovered 430 BTC in wallets allegedly linked to the Silk Road founder. The coins are worth nearly $49 million, but questions remain about access to them.