Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road darknet marketplace, or someone managing his wallet, accidentally dumped the value of ROSS meme coins sent as donations. Analysts at Arkham flagged the incident.

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

During the initialization of a liquidity pool on Raydium, an incorrect token price was set. The ROSS tokens, worth $1.5M, sourced from PumpFun, were instantly sniped by an MEV bot and sold into the newly created pool.

The script repeated this process multiple times, leading to total losses of $12M.

The creators of ROSS had sent 50% of the meme coin’s total supply to Ulbricht’s address. However, the MEV bot offloaded 80% of these tokens for just over $600,000, crashing the token’s price by approximately 90%.

Ulbricht still holds 10% of the supply, now valued at around $200,000, following the proper addition of a Raydium Concentrated Liquidity pool.

On January 22, U.S. President Donald Trump granted Ulbricht a pardon, overturning his two life sentences.

Coinbase Head of Product Conor Grogan recently identified 430 BTC in wallets allegedly linked to the Silk Road founder. The stash is worth nearly $49M, but questions remain about Ulbricht’s access to these funds.