Two wallet addresses linked to Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road marketplace, recently lost approximately $12 million worth of meme coins due to pricing errors, according to blockchain analytics platform Arkham.
The affected wallets are associated with FreeRoss.org, a donation platform operated by Ulbricht’s family to advocate for his release. These wallets initially received 50% of ROSS, a memecoin launched following Ulbricht’s release from prison via a pardon by U.S. President Donald Trump on January 22. The token has gained traction recently, surging over 735% in the past day, according to DEX Screener data.
The losses occurred on January 30, when the wallets attempted to provide liquidity for 5% of ROSS’s supply on Raydium. However, a pricing error caused the tokens to be sold far below market value, allowing a Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot to capitalize on the opportunity. The bot purchased $1.5 million worth of tokens and resold them, further impacting the token’s price.
Determined to recover, the wallet operators attempted to add liquidity again, this time using single-sided liquidity provisioning. However, they mistakenly selected Raydium’s Constant-Product Market Maker instead of the Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker, repeating the same pricing error. This second mishap resulted in the loss of 35% of the ROSS token supply, valued at over $600,000, which was again acquired by an MEV bot. The repeated mistakes triggered a 90% price drop for the token.
Currently, the wallets still hold 10% of the token supply, worth approximately $200,000. Despite the setbacks, the ROSS token has rebounded, reaching $0.0104 with a $14.8 million trading volume, according to DEX Screener data.
The ROSS token mishap wasn’t the only meme coin-related controversy recently. Siqi Chen, the creator of the MIRA memecoin, recently issued a public apology after the launch of a controversial test token, ZERO, resulted in significant losses for traders.
Chen launched ZERO on pump.fun, a Solana-based meme coin platform, as an experiment to analyze investor behaviour. The token’s description explicitly warned that its value was designed to drop to zero. However, despite these clear disclaimers, traders poured in funds, only to experience substantial financial losses as the token inevitably collapsed.
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