Ross Ulbricht Lost $12M in Donations Due to a Mishap with ROSS Meme Coins
Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road darknet marketplace—or someone managing his wallet—accidentally crashed the price of ROSS tokens that were sent as donations. Analysts at Arkham flagged the incident.
The issue arose during the initialization of a liquidity pool on the decentralized exchange Raydium, where the asset was mistakenly priced. As a result, MEV bots instantly intercepted and sold off $1.5 million worth of tokens sourced from the PumpFun platform into the newly created pool.
The bot repeated this process multiple times, ultimately leading to a total loss of $12 million.
ROSS token creators had originally sent 50% of the total meme coin supply to Ulbricht’s address. However, an MEV bot quickly offloaded 80% of these tokens, generating just over $600,000 and causing a price crash of approximately 90%.
Despite the losses, the Silk Road founder still holds 10% of the total supply, valued at around $200,000, following the correct setup of the Raydium Concentrated Liquidity pool.
