Wallets tied to Ross Ulbricht lost around $12m worth of meme coins after accidentally selling them at the wrong price. Since the blunder, the ROSS token is now up more than 700%.
According to Arkham, the two wallet addresses are listed on the donation site FreeRoss.org, which is run by the Silk Road creator’s family to get him released from prison. The Solana (SOL) addresses received 50% of the token supply from the developer of pump.fun token, ROSS.
ROSS is a meme coin that was created after Ross Ulbricht was released from prison after President Trump pardoned him on Jan. 22. The token is currently on the rise, going up by more than 735% in the past 24 hours, according to DEX Screener.
On Jan. 30, the wallets holding 50% of the ROSS token supply “accidentally nuked the price” of 5% of the pump.fun supply when it tried to provide liquidity on Raydium. Thus, selling the tokens at a price much lower than the current market price.
A passing MEV bot saw the golden opportunity and snatched up the tokens, worth $1.5 million at the time, and sold them into the existing pool. MEV bots or maximal extractable value bots are deployed to look for opportunities to make profit in the market and can automatically carry out trading activities, without missing a beat.
After losing $1.5 million worth of ROSS tokens, the Ross Ulbricht-linked wallets were not deterred. The operator tried again, attempting to add single-sided liquidity so that it could sell the meme coins off passively. However, they accidentally created a pool with Raydium Constant-Product Market Maker instead of Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker; once again selling the tokens at the wrong price.
This time the mistake was even more fatal, as roughly 35% of the Ross Ulbricht token supply was lost and snatched up by another MEV bot. The bot sold the tokens for over $600,000, dragging the meme coin’s price down by around 90%. The wallets reportedly still hold around 10% of the token supply, worth around $200,000.
Since the disastrous sell-off, ROSS has regained its footing. At the time of writing, the token has gone up as high as 735% in the past day. It is currently trading hands at a price of $0.0104 with a trading volume of $14.8 million.
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