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.
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.
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.
Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.
Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.
Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.
The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.
