A pinned X post from crypto-friendly Argentinian President Javier Milei helped boost a newly-launched token $LIBRA, intended to boost Argentinian small businesses, to a peak $4.5 billion market capitalization.
"This private project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy by funding small Argentine businesses and startups," Milei said in a since-deleted post, translated from Spanish. "The world wants to invest in Argentina."
However, mere hours after the token's rise, 8 wallets related to the $LIBRA team cashed out $107 million, according to Lookonchain, sparking a 95% crash in the token's market cap and accusations of an insider rug pull. Analytics firm Bubblemaps had noted that 83% of the token's supply was concentrated in a small cluster of wallets.
Following the crash, Milei deleted his post and rescinded his endorsement, denying any connection to the project.
"To the filthy rats of the political caste who want to take advantage of this situation to do harm, I want to say that every day they confirm how vile politicians are, and they increase our conviction to kick them in the ass," a translation of Milei's Spanish-language post states.
A Jupiter team member also denied that the exchange, which verified the token after launch, had any knowledge of the token's launch in advance.
"The Jupiter team was not involved in the $Libra token launch. we didn't do the deployment, the market making, or participate in the launch," Kash Dhanda said on X. "There were dozens of imposter tokens, and given there was an official public statement with a CA, we wanted to ensure that users were able to identify the correct token."
The token now has a market cap of $232 million, a 95% crash from its peak value.
Julian Peh, the CEO and co-founder of KIP Protocol, a Web3 firm associated with the project, denied rug pull accusations in an X space on Saturday.
"The whole internet is saying it's a rug," Peh said. "But this thing, if it was a rug to start with, then we wouldn't have gotten the support we did." Peh said KIP plans to run the project "as per the original purpose" and denied that the token had a pre-sale in a separate post.
Peh also denied profiting from the token's crash. "We are definitely not the token issuing front, we are not a trading company," Peh said. "We are a technical company and we have been responsible for allocating capital before, so we were supposed to be involved in the front where the funds would be distributed to Argentine companies."
"It's inaccurate for me even to say that we didn't profit from this only because...nobody has profited from this," Peh said. "And I know that that may not be what everybody wants to hear or can believe right now but I think time will prove us right."
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