Crypto wallets linked to Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road creator who recently received a pardon, lost a staggering $12 million due to a trading error involving a memecoin called ROSS. This information comes from Arkham Intelligence, a blockchain analytics firm.
Arkham reported that Ulbricht, or someone managing his wallets, accidentally "nuked the price" of the fan-made memecoin while trying to provide liquidity on a decentralized exchange (DEX) called Raydium. This incident was highlighted in a post on X on January 30.
Here’s what happened: Ulbricht initialized the liquidity pool at the wrong price. As a result, $1.5 million worth of the token—about 5% of its total supply—was snatched up by a maximal extractable value (MEV) bot. This bot quickly sold the tokens into the existing pool. The tokens became available for trading at a lower price, allowing the MEV bot to buy them right away and make a profit.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The wallet associated with Ulbricht made the same mistake again, leading to another loss of around $10.5 million, which is roughly 35% of the total supply. Arkham explained that Ulbricht intended to add single-sided liquidity to sell the coins passively. Instead, he mistakenly created a pool using Raydium’s Constant-Product Market Maker (CPMM) instead of the Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker (CLMM).
The MEV bot sold off the tokens for over $600,000. As a result, the price of ROSS plummeted by 90%. Currently, DEX Screener shows ROSS trading at about 1 cent, having increased roughly 700% in the last day.
Both wallet addresses flagged by Arkham are listed for donations on FreeRoss.org, a campaign run by Ulbricht’s family to advocate for his release. Ulbricht’s Solana donation address received 50% of the total ROSS supply from the developer.
Despite these significant losses, Arkham noted that the wallet addresses still hold 10% of the ROSS token supply, valued at around $200,000.
For context, Ulbricht operated the online black market Silk Road, which used Bitcoin for transactions, until his arrest in 2013. He was sentenced to a double life term plus 40 years in 2015. On January 22, former President Donald Trump granted Ulbricht a pardon, fulfilling one of his campaign promises related to cryptocurrency.