Ross Ulbricht donation wallet enjoys perfect PvE moment

The crypto experience has changed a lot in the past 12 years

article-image

Phil Pasquini/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share


This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.


Crypto’s “wartime” shtick isn’t an exaggeration. 

It’s brutal out here even in a bull market — as recently-pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht has apparently just found out.

As there are very real conflicts happening around the world right now, gaming might be the better analogy. 

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 whoever is in control of his Solana donation wallet) recently suffered a quintessential PvE experience in crypto:

  • Someone sent the wallet 50% supply of a pump.fun coin, ROSS, worth $15 million.
  • The wallet moved to sell $12 million ROSS on Raydium but mispriced it after creating the wrong type of liquidity pool.
  • An MEV bot detected the arbitrage opportunity and intercepted trades, dumping the tokens via the existing liquidity pool for $600,000 and crashing the price by 90%.
  • Ulbricht’s donation wallet received nothing in return.
Loading Tweet..

It’s been characterized as a $12 million loss, but that isn’t really true. The tokens were free, so any cash generated from selling would’ve been pure profit. 

The wallet still held 10% of the supply as of Thursday evening, currently worth about over $1 million.

And ok, the MEV bot is controlled by a real person. But considering this particular fumble was mostly due to a misconfigured liquidity pool, I’d say this incident was pure PvE.

Meanwhile, in an adjacent corner of crypto, there’s someone going all out on the PvP experience.

Coinbase director Conor Grogan earlier this week pointed to a single address responsible for launching around 18,000 different tokens via pump.fun.

Every day, the person controlling that address appears to “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 wrote on X, who commented it seems the launches are manual and not automated.

Loading Tweet..

The implication is that whoever controls the address is dumping the coins on whoever might buy them, rugging each time — total PvP behavior.

So far, the address has executed nearly 6.8 million trades with a 55.6% win rate, so they’re probably profitable. 

It could also be they’re farming a potential future pump.fun airdrop, in which case the profits would be effectively compounded if they’re eligible. 

You might not like it, but this is what peak crypto performance looks like in 2025.

On the other hand, it’s hard to blame Ulbricht, if it really is him controlling the wallet. When was arrested there were just 36 cryptocurrencies and only 16 had a market cap over six figures. 

Something tells me he’ll catch up quickly.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily, with Byron Gilliam.

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

Unlocked by Template (10).png

Research

Innovations on Aptos’ technical design through Raptr, Shardines, and Zaptos approach near-optimal latency and throughput by unlocking 100% utilization of network resources, with the capacity to settle 260k transactions per second with latencies less than 800ms. The original Move language was revamped with the launch of Move 2, supporting more expressivity in smart contract logic and a scalable ability to interact with high volume datasets. The ecosystem has benefitted from strong asset inflows, now hosting over $1.3B in stablecoins, $450M in bridged BTC, and $530M in RWAs. Activity in the Aptos ecosystem has grown notably over the past year, with monthly application revenue reaching ~$835k and monthly DEX volumes growing to over $5B, both at new all time highs.

article-image

Interchain Labs will focus on sovereign L1s and institutional demand, abandoning plans for smart contracts on the Cosmos Hub

article-image

Also, only three tokens have outperformed bitcoin so far this year: XMR, HYPE and SKY

article-image

The fund group has submitted proposals in recent months for other funds that would hold litecoin, solana, XRP, HBAR, Sui and others

article-image

Momentum’s back — BTC leads, risk assets follow

article-image

Ondo Finance’s acquisition of blockchain development company Strangelove follows its buy of Oasis Pro

article-image

Cryptocurrency and stock traders alike had a lot to unpack Wednesday