Despite calling for the death penalty for drug dealers, president Donald Trump pardoned Ross "Dread Pirate Roberts" Ulbricht, the man behind the seminal online drug marketplace Silk Road, which facilitated the sale of over $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods using bitcoin.
Now Ulbricht is a free man, and as Protos reports, crypto wallets linked to him have received countless donations as he's become a martyr-like figure.
But instead of returning the favor or making a quick buck by selling off a portion of his newfound riches, Ulbricht appears to be honoring a longtime tradition in the world of crypto: losing money on doomed meme coins.
According to blockchain analysis firm Arkham Intelligence, the wallets linked to Ulbricht have already lost an estimated $12 million worth of donations on Pump Fun, the infamous meme coin platform that's often used by celebrities for blatant pump-and-dump schemes.
It remains unclear whether Ulbricht was behind the disastrous bets on the platform, or somebody else with access to his wallet keys.
The blunder happened when the wallets attempted to sell accumulated $ROSS tokens, a meme coin created to celebrate his pardoning. Whoever's behind the wallet seems to have accidentally sold the tokens at a massive discount — and before they could correct their mistake, automated trading bots made the situation far worse, leading to millions of dollars in losses.
The screwup serves as a great reminder of the substantial risks involved in trading volatile meme coins — lessons that seemingly even the mind behind Silk Road has yet to learn.
Ulbricht's personal involvement in the affair remains unclear. The former crypto baron tweeted on January 19 — two days before $ROSS was minted — that he was "not involved or associated with any meme coin bearing my name. There is no official Ross coin."
But an anonymous developer gave wallets linked to Ulbricht half of the supply of the meme coin when it was created, according to Arkham.
"Ross 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)," the blockchain analysis firm tweeted.
The faux pas sent the value of the coin plummeting by roughly 90 percent. According to Arkham, Ulbricht still holds roughly $200,000 worth of the coin, "despite losing 40 percent of the supply."
The memecoin has since fluctuated wildly, and is up 103 percent over the last day, according to DEX Screener, further highlighting the extremely volatile nature of these crypto assets.
Some members of the crypto community were sympathetic following Ulbricht's massive blunder.
"Wow... welcome to the trenches," one X-formerly-Twitter user tweeted in response.
"Imagine having such a crappy UX that even Bitcoin OGs can't figure it out, let alone the normies," another user wrote. "Web3 will only become mainstream when we figure out how to improve the UX in a dramatic way."
More on meme coins: Trump's Meme Coin Is Down 64 Percent From Its High
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