Crypto’s “wartime” Shtick doesn’t exaggerate.
It’s brutal out here even in a bull market — as recently-pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht has apparently just found out.
In light of the current conflicts that are taking place around the globe, it might be better to use the analogy of gaming.
There are two major types of online multiplayer experience: player vs. player (PvP) — Street Fighter, StarCraft, CounterStrike — and player vs. environment (PvE) — Helldivers 2, Diablo 4, World of WarCraft.
Ulbricht, or at least the person in charge of his Solana wallet suffered an experience that is a classic PvE in cryptocurrency:
- Someone gave the wallet a half-supply of ROSS pump.fun, worth 15 million dollars.
- After creating the incorrect type of liquidity pool, the wallet sold $12 million in ROSS for Raydium at a mispriced price.
- The MEV bot identified the arbitrage and executed trades. It then dumped tokens through the liquidity pool at $600,000. This caused the price to fall by 90%.
- Ulbricht’s donation wallet got nothing back
The loss has been described as $12 million, but this is not accurate. Since the tokens were given away for free, any money generated by selling them would have been pure profit.
As of Thursday night, the wallet held about $1,000,000 worth of supplies.
Okay, so the MEV Bot is being controlled by someone real. Since this particular incident is mainly due to misconfigured liquid pool, this would be a PvE.
While in the adjacent crypto corner, there is someone who has gone all-out with PvP.
Conor Grogan, Coinbase’s director of product management and marketing pointed out earlier in the week that a single pump.fun address was responsible for the launch of around 18,000.
The person who controls that address is visible every day. “wake up and create on average ~a dozen of tokens an hour until they go to bed, and then do it again, every day. They’ve done this for months,” Grogan commented on X who said that it appears the launch is manual, and not automated.
The implication is that whoever controls the address is dumping the coins on whoever might buy them, rugging each time — total PvP behavior.
The address is probably making money. They’ve executed 6.8 millions trades so far with a win rate of 55.6%.
They could be farming for a future airdrop of pump.fun, and if eligible the profits will be compounded.
It’s not what you want to see, but here is how peak crypto performance will look in 2025.
Ulbricht is not to be blamed if he controls the wallet. At the time of his arrest, there were only 36 cryptocurrencies. Only 16 had market caps above six figures.
He’ll be able to catch up fast, I think.
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