- Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht lost $12 million in a memecoin trading mistake.
- A mispriced liquidity pool allowed bots to drain funds in minutes.
- ROSS token plunged 90%, but Ulbricht’s wallet still holds 10% of the supply.
- Donald Trump pardoned Ulbricht on January 22, fulfilling a crypto-related campaign promise.
Ross Ulbricht, the infamous founder of Silk Road, just lost $12 million in a memecoin trading mishap. According to Arkham Intelligence, wallets linked to Ulbricht attempted to provide liquidity for the ROSS token but accidentally set the wrong price, allowing bots to scoop up millions in an instant.
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
The incident happened on January 30 when a fan-made token called ROSS—launched after Ulbricht’s recent presidential pardon—was added to the Raydium decentralized exchange (DEX).
Unfortunately, the liquidity pool was set at an incorrect price, and a MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) bot took advantage, quickly snapping up $1.5 million worth of tokens before selling them off.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Second Mistake Wipes Out $10.5M More
After the first slip-up, Ulbricht’s team tried again—only to repeat the same mistake.
This time, they lost another $10.5 million, amounting to 35% of the total ROSS supply.
Ross Ulbricht(@RealRossU), the founder of Silk Road, lost 400M $ROSS ($1.77M) due to a mistake in adding liquidity to the Raydium pool.
An MEV bot spent 2.3 $SOL($556) to buy 398.6M $ROSS at a low price, and quickly sold it for 2,669 $SOL($643.5K), making $643K!… pic.twitter.com/X73wMQPDaT
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) January 30, 2025
Instead of adding liquidity correctly, the wallet accidentally created a pool using Raydium’s CPMM (Constant-Product Market Maker) model instead of CLMM (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker). This allowed the bot to sell off the tokens for over $600,000 before anyone could react.
The result? ROSS lost 90% of its value in minutes.
ROSS Token Still Survives
Despite the massive loss, ROSS is still trading at around 1 cent, up 700% in the past 24 hours, according to DEX Screener.
$ROSS, a meme coin with a 1 billion supply, sparked controversy by allocating 50% to Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s wallet. This raised ethical concerns. Traded on BingX against USDT, its $13M+ current market cap highlights meme coin volatility and risk. Was this support or… pic.twitter.com/jQRBY5rzbu
— MD DODO (@MYA_DODO) January 31, 2025
Arkham reports that Ulbricht’s wallets still hold 10% of the total ROSS supply, worth around $200,000. The wallets, listed as donation addresses on FreeRoss.org, were initially allocated 50% of the total token supply by the developers.
Even with the bot-induced crash, the project still has support from Ulbricht’s followers, many of whom believe he was unjustly sentenced.
Trump’s Crypto-Backed Pardon
Ulbricht, who operated Silk Road—a notorious darknet marketplace that ran on Bitcoin payments—was arrested in 2013 and sentenced in 2015 to two life sentences plus 40 years for money laundering, hacking, and drug trafficking.
Ross Ulbricht thanks President Trump after receiving a pardon:
“I was doing life without parole and I was locked up for more than 11 years and he let me out. I’m a free man now. So let it be known that Donald Trump is a man of his word.”pic.twitter.com/TWHVloFLuM
— The American Conservative (@amconmag) January 24, 2025
However, on January 22, Donald Trump pardoned Ulbricht, keeping a promise made during his crypto-friendly campaign.
His release sparked renewed interest in Silk Road’s legacy, leading to the creation of ROSS token—which has now become one of the most unexpected cautionary tales in crypto.
Final Thoughts
The ROSS token debacle is yet another reminder of how even experienced crypto users can make costly mistakes in the fast-moving world of decentralized finance.
While Ulbricht is now a free man, his crypto misstep shows that the digital Wild West he once helped create is still just as unforgiving as ever.
