Milei’s crypto scandal led to losses for 86% of traders

An estimated 86 percent of crypto traders that took positions in a memecoin endorsed by President Javier Milei on Friday ended up losing money, according to research firm Nansen.

The losses in the token called Libra totalled an estimated US$251 million, while the minority of traders who profited made a combined US$180 million, the firm said in a report dissecting the winners and losers from the memecoin at the centre of the biggest scandal the libertarian president has faced since taking office more than a year ago.

“We see very tangible on-chain evidence showing a group of ‘insiders’ unilaterally profiting off of the masses who got involved,” Nansen’s Nicolai Sondergaard wrote in the report that analysed more than 15,000 crypto wallets that saw gains or losses of more than US$1,000.

The episode has also led to concern about the prospects for the Solana blockchain, the underlying network that hosts the Libra token and tens of thousands of other memecoins. Solana’s namesake token plunged about 20 percent from Friday evening through its lows on Tuesday. The total value of tokens locked on the blockchain, a key metric of interest in projects hosted by the network, has fallen from US$12.1 billion to US$8.29 billion, Nansen wrote, citing DefiLllama data, “with investors likely speculating on the future issuance and trading of memecoins.”

The drama began late Friday night, when Milei directed followers to a website that purported to raise money for small businesses in Argentina using the crypto token. So-called snipers, or trading bots that attempt to front-run gains in hot new cryptocurrencies, began trading when Milei’s initial tweet sparked interest in the market, according to Nansen.

Yet the gains — which pushed the token’s market value to about US$4.5 billion — were fleeting.

Hayden Davis, the chief executive officer of Kelsier Ventures, which helped launch the coin, later dismissed Libra as just a memecoin “in stark contrast to its initial framing as a tool for Argentina’s economy,” the Nansen researcher wrote.

And as concern spread in Argentina that the president’s social media account had been hacked or that he had fallen victim to crypto scammers himself, Milei deleted his original post on X about five hours after posting it. He wrote that he was “not aware of the details of the project and after having become aware of it I decided not to continue spreading the word.”

Yet by the time Milei deleted his original post on X, the token had already plummeted 80 percent from its peak, according to Nansen.

“What started with a presidential endorsement and a US$4.5-billion valuation quickly unravelled as ‘insiders’ took profits, retail got burned, and key backers distanced themselves,” the Nansen researchers wrote. “Onchain data make it clear that a handful of wallets walked away with millions, while most traders were left with deep losses.”