Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, or someone with access to his wallets, lost $12 million. The mishap happened as he ettempted to provide liquidity for a memecoin on Solana, which is Pump.Fun, according to blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence.
Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht Scammed
“ROSS ULBRICHT LOST $12M ON PUMPFUN,” Arkham posted on X, detailing how Ulbricht mistakenly initialized a liquidity pool at the wrong price, allowing a Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) bot to exploit the situation.
“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,” Arkham stated. “Then he did it again and he lost another $10.5M. (35% supply).”
The incident involved the ROSS token, a Solana-based memecoin tied to the Ross Ulbricht Fund. Arkham reported that Ulbricht’s Solana donation address received 50% of the token’s total supply from the developer last week.
Attempting to sell off the tokens gradually, Ulbricht “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),” Arkham explained.
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
This mistake allowed an MEV bot to seize and sell the tokens, profiting over $600,000 while triggering a massive price drop. “The MEV Bot that took the coins managed to sell them off for over $600K, sending the price down -90% in the process,” Arkham reported.
Despite losing 40% of the token’s supply, Ulbricht still retains a portion of the holdings. “Ross still holds 10% of the token in a separate address, with LP correctly added on Raydium Concentrated Liquidity. (currently worth ~$200K),” Arkham noted.
Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, is currently serving a double life sentence without parole for operating the darknet marketplace. The ROSS token incident is the latest development involving his name in the crypto space.
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Source: https://www.cryptonewsz.com/silk-road-ross-ulbricht-lose-12m-pump-fun-scam/