The X account of Argentina's President Javier Milei promoted a Solana meme coin called LIBRA late Friday. Traders initially piled in to purchase the coin, which surged to a market cap of about $4.5 billion—but amid growing doubts over the legitimacy of the launch and whether it was a pump-and-dump scam, the price has since plummeted.
LIBRA has plunged by about 87% since it peaked just hours earlier after it was announced on X (formerly Twitter). Data from crypto analytics platform DexScreener showed that LIBRA reached a price of $4.50 after launching, but has since crashed to under $0.60. The token has racked up about $1.1 billion in trading volume in a matter of a few hours.
According to the purported website of the Viva La Libertad Project, the aim of the meme coin initiative is to boost the Argentine economy by funding small projects and local businesses.
“This private project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy by funding small Argentine businesses and startups,” a message posted to Milei’s account reads (as translated by X). “The world wants to invest in Argentina.”
The episode recalled the surprise launch of U.S. President Donald Trump’s TRUMP token in January, just days before his inauguration. As with that earlier launch, meme coin traders flocked to buy into LIBRA as it started to soar—but many started to second-guess whether it was a legitimate launch, or if the leader’s account had perhaps been hijacked.
Trump's coin was ultimately legit. Milei’s X post remains live as of this writing, more than three hours after it was first shared, but many traders have dumped their holdings while on-chain analysts point to concerns around the launch.
On-chain analytics firm Chainalysis noted several potential red flags regarding the token launch, including receiving its first funding of SOL from an instant swap service, plus a large portion of the supply being controlled by a single wallet.
“The address that created the token and the address holding a large portion of the LIBRA supply also appear to be controlled by single private keys, rather than multi-signature setups that are more common of established token launches,” Chainalysis wrote.
Bubblemaps, an on-chain data visualization startup, alleged that the team behind LIBRA is cashing out, accelerating its price decline in recent hours.
“They already made $87M by removing USDC and SOL from liquidity pools,” Bubblemaps wrote on X. “LIBRA is down 85% because the devs absorbed $87M of buy pressure into their pockets. $500M more to go.”
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