Newly freed Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht appears to squander $12 million in potential memecoin profits

Ross Ulbricht leaving prison in January 2025, wearing a grey sweatsuit and carrying a small potted plantRoss Ulbricht leaving prison in January 2025 (attribution)
Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road darknet market place, earned a presidential pardon on January 21 as an apparent thank you by President Trump to the Libertarian Party. When fans created a token called $ROSS to celebrate his release, they sent a substantial number of the tokens — 50% of the supply — to donation wallets that his family have operated for years, used to raise money to campaign for his release.

It's not clear whether Ulbricht has taken over control of these wallets, or if they are still being operated on his behalf. Either way, whoever does control the wallets made a big mistake when they tried to cash out on their memecoin stash by adding single-sided liquidity on Meteora. They accidentally initialized the liquidity pool at too low a price, allowing a MEV bot to snap up 5% of the token supply (notionally ~$1.5 million) at a discount and resell them.

The wallet operator then made the same error again with a larger quantity of tokens, selling off another 35% of the supply and losing out on around $10.5 million in notional value.