Argentina’s LIBRA meme coin crashes, erasing $4.4b after controversial Milei post
The Solana-based LIBRA token, initially promoted by Argentinian President Javier Milei, collapsed within hours of its launch.
The collapse wiped out $4.4 billion in market capitalization and affected the overall meme coin market.
The incident began with Milei’s social media post at 5:01 PM ET, promoting a token purportedly aimed at “boosting the Argentine economy by funding small projects.” The project’s website, created just hours before launch, included a Google Form for funding applications but lacked detailed tokenomics or transparent ownership information.
On-chain analysis revealed concentrated insider activity, with 82% of LIBRA tokens held in a single cluster. According to Bubblemaps data, insiders extracted $87.4 million within the first three hours through strategic liquidity manipulation. The team used Meteora’s one-sided liquidity pools instead of direct market sales, removing USD and SOL while the token price plummeted over 90%.
Detailed wallet analysis by Ember CN tracked multiple coordinated trades:
- One address turned 1 million USDC into $8.58 million profit
- Another converted 1.1 million USDC into $6.45 million
- A third wallet transformed 500,000 USDC into $5.15 million
The quick collapse affected the overall crypto market, with even Trump’s meme coin experiencing sharp declines. Over 50,000 wallets acquired LIBRA tokens within two hours of launch, while total market losses exceeded $6 billion during the three-hour downturn.
Milei later distanced himself from the project, deleting his initial post and claiming he “was not aware of the details.” He characterized the incident as an attempt by “filthy rats of the political caste” to discredit him.
On-chain analysts later confirmed the LIBRA team had extracted $107 million total, with eight wallets accumulating 57.6 million USDC and 249,671 SOL ($49.7 million) through liquidity manipulation and fee claims. The event marks one of the largest and fastest collapses in meme coin history.
