Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht-associated wallets reportedly lost $12 million due to errors while providing liquidity for the fan-made ROSS meme coin on Raydium.
By Bhushan Akolkar
Edited by Julia Sakovich
Updated
2 mins read
As per data on blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence, crypto wallets associated with Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht have lost a massive $12 million after a meme coin trading mistake. US President Donald Trump recently pardoned Unbricht’s prison term a day after joining the White House office.
This led to the creation of a fan-based meme coin ROSS after the Silk Road creator, riding on the current sectorial wave. However, in an X post on January 30, Arkham noted that Ulbricht, or someone managing his wallets, inadvertently caused a sharp drop in the price of ROSS while attempting to provide liquidity on the decentralized exchange Raydium. The blockchain analytics firm noted:
“Because he initialized the liquidity pool at the wrong price, $1.5M of the token (5% supply) was instantly taken by a MEV Bot, then sold into the existing pool”.
The ROSS meme coin was immediately available for trading at a lower price which a maximal extractable value (MEV) bot quickly purchased and resold for profit. MEV bots execute the trade automatically while hunting lucrative opportunities in the market.
According to Arkham, the wallet linked to Ulbricht repeated the same error, resulting in an additional loss of $10.5 million, or roughly 35% of the token’s supply. “Ross tried to add single-sided liquidity to sell the coins off passively, but accidentally created a pool with Raydium CPMM, Constant-Product Market Maker, instead of CLMM Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker,” Arkam said.
A maximal extractable value (MEV) bot reportedly sold off mispriced ROSS tokens for over $600,000, as per the data from Arkham Intelligence. This action caused the fan-made token to plummet by 90%, as the bot capitalized on the mispricing and dumped the acquired tokens.
Despite the crash, data from DEX Screener indicates that ROSS is currently trading at around $0.01, marking a 700% increase over the past day. the wallets flagged by Arkham now appear as donation addresses on FreeRoss.org, a campaign led by Ross Ulbricht’s family advocating for his release from prison. Interestingly, the Solana donation addresses for Ross Ulbricht had received 50% of the ROSS token supply from the developer.
Even after losing 40% of the token’s supply due to trading errors, Arkham reported that the flagged wallets still retain 10% of the ROSS supply, valued at approximately $200,000.
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Bhushan is a FinTech enthusiast and holds a good flair in understanding financial markets. His interest in economics and finance draw his attention towards the new emerging Blockchain Technology and Cryptocurrency markets. He is continuously in a learning process and keeps himself motivated by sharing his acquired knowledge. In free time he reads thriller fictions novels and sometimes explore his culinary skills.
