Author: shushu
The 'large MC memecoin' rule came into effect again at 7 a.m., but this is the first time someone has been relieved not to have woken up.
The reason is that the Argentine 'Bitcoin' President, well-known in the crypto world, has endorsed a meme coin called LIBRA, although it is not like TRUMP, a namesake token of Trump, but because of the long-awaited opportunity for a president to issue a coin with a wealth-creating effect like TRUMP, LIBRA has also been equated with the same heavyweight as Trump's coin issuance.
But despite being a Saturday morning just like TRUMP, LIBRA did not share the same fate. One large loss wallet after another was exposed, with even Solayer founder Chaofan Shou and Solayer engineers losing over $2 million on LIBRA, and captioning "Let's see what two hackers and an idle weekend can bring us".
Why, with all the elements in place - the president, the Moonshot, the big pool - did LIBRA end up with such a script? Why couldn't we make money from LIBRA?
Presidential Endorsement, Team Harvesting
It can be said that Milei's tweet endorsing LIBRA's CA and official website link was the main reason for the surge in LIBRA's market value. Just like Trump, shouting slogans, and after confirming that the account was not hacked, the market value soared to $4 billion.
Milei wrote in his tweet "This private project will be dedicated to promoting the growth of the Argentine economy, by providing funding support to small businesses and entrepreneurial projects in Argentina."
But the atmosphere gradually became unsettling. Less than two hours after the LIBRA token was issued, the market value had just broken through $4.4 billion when LIBRA started to have large-scale dumping. At first, the group members thought it was profit-taking, but the crash continued, and they realized that a batch of addresses had started to withdraw from the pool.
At 9 a.m., according to Bubblemaps' analysis, the LIBRA issuance team had already profited over $87 million through pool-draining behavior across multiple addresses.
By noon, according to Lookonchain's monitoring, 8 wallets related to the LIBRA team had obtained 5.76 million USDC and 249,671 SOL (about $49.7 million) through adding liquidity, removing liquidity and charging fees, a total of about $107 million in cash-out.
But despite this, there are still traders analyzing the potential of LIBRA, saying that since no one has come out to refute it, there may still be positive news to push up the coin price.
The President Shifts Blame, the Team Self-Exposes
But all this was shattered by Milei's next tweet.
The president said he had supported a so-called private entrepreneurial project, but had no association with the project. "I did not understand the details of the project, and after understanding, I decided not to continue disseminating the relevant information (and therefore deleted the tweet)."
In the thick atmosphere of Valentine's Day, Milei staged a truly heartbreaking scumbag performance. By this time, LIBRA's market value had already plummeted to $450 million, and with the tweet, LIBRA's market value immediately plummeted to $200 million.
Even more absurdly, a project actually came out and claimed LIBRA's issuance. The Viva la Libertad project website shows that the project is a private independent project developed by KIP Protocol.
As LIBRA was zeroing out, Web3 AI base layer KIP Protocol issued a statement saying it had launched the "Viva la Libertad" project to help private enterprises in Argentina, and the success of LIBRA was due to the trust and support of everyone. It also supplemented that President Milei, both in the past and present, has not participated in the development of this project, and Viva la Libertad is an independent private project developed by KIP Protocol.
Julian, the co-founder of KIP, on the left, and President Milei on the right, photo published in October 2024.
Subsequently, Julian stated that the Viva la Libertad project funds are still on-chain, and no SOL has been transferred. The KIP team is involved in the project, mainly responsible for managing the fund allocation to Argentine companies, rather than the token side.
What are the lessons learned?
A tweet pointed out that LIBRA was a carefully crafted scam to harvest the IQ150 group members, the main reason being that with the experience of TRUMP before and Moonshot after, some people suffered losses due to FOMO without carefully checking all the information about LIBRA.
For example, at 6:30 a.m., the analysis agency Bubblemaps said that 82% of the total LIBRA supply was concentrated in one address, and the token economics were not disclosed.
There were also issues such as the LIBRA minting function being freezable, the liquidity pool not being destroyed and having high fees, and the suspicious source of funds.
In addition, the project website was built using Webflow and displayed a Gmail address, and no formal information related to "KIP NETWORK INC" could be found, indicating a lack of actual association with token issuance or related business. Although the website is in English, considering the project background, it should be in Spanish, and the domain was also purchased on the same day, further questioning the credibility of the project.
Smart people learned from TRUMP to check LIBRA on Moonshot first thing, and finding the contract was the reason many smart money dared to go all-in. But what was found through the contract was not actually listed on Moonshot, as Moonshot had changed its application rules a few days earlier, allowing projects to register on Moonshot and be found through the contract address, but only if the token name was manually searched on Moonshot would it be the real listing.
And sometimes making money is just a matter of luck. Some people don't like to sleep in, so they caught TRUMP, while some people like to sleep in, so they avoided LIBRA.
On 1/18/2025, TRUMP issued a coin, and you got rich. Your relatives and friends heard about it and complained that you didn't notify them right away to get rich together. You said, "I'll set up a small group next time there's a presidential coin issuance and notify you first."
On 2/15/2025, the Argentine president issued a coin, and you frantically called your friends to 'All In'.
On 2/15/2025, you had no friends left.
Although the anecdote is funny, the losses are real and painful, but hopefully next time the group members will still call me, and we'll make it back!
Finally, a reminder to group members to beware of extortion scams after losing money.
