The Bybit heist overshadowed the huge riot surrounding the Libra token, involving Argentine President Javier Milei. It is, bizarrely, the second president this year to mess withmemecoin. For a while it was thought that Milei's social media accounts had been hacked, but he later admitted to being involved. The posts were then deleted, which only made the situation more suspicious.
Further investigation by the phenomenal journalist Coffeezilla, who even got the mastermind behind Libra to admit to a series of crimes, reveals that Libra was immediately sniped at launch, a trading strategy in which bots buy up tokens immediately after launch. Founders of the project have a huge advantage in doing so because they know in advance the addresses where the bots can buy up the tokens. Libra's founders caused a huge price increase with their own purchases, then sold their tokens for a huge profit.
A total of $83.5 million worth of Libra tokens were sold by insiders, a classic "back pull," leaving subsequent buyers with worthless tokens. The scandal may signal the end of the meme-coin craze, similar to how the FTX crash was a turning point for centralized exchanges and played into the hands of the rise of decentralized exchanges.
In episode 4 of the NFA Podcast(here on YouTube and here on Spotify), Nisheta Sachdev and I discussed at length the Libra scandal and the potential implications for memecoin hype and the Solana token, the platform on which most memecoins run.