Hayden Davis dropped a bombshell that sent shockwaves through the crypto community. The LIBRA co-creator casually admitted in an interview that project wallets had sniped their own token at launch. His justification? To stop other snipers from getting in first. Yeah, really.
The admission came after LIBRA’s spectacular rise and catastrophic fall. The memecoin surged to a mind-boggling $4 billion market cap on launch day, only to nosedive by more than 95% within hours. Insider trading bots used sophisticated mempool monitoring systems to execute their trades. Even Argentine President Javier Milei’s initial backing couldn’t save it – he quickly distanced himself from the project as things went south.
Davis’s team employed sophisticated front-running tactics and bots to snatch up tokens before regular investors could get in. They used a separate treasury for these purchases, claiming the profits belonged to the project. Classic move. He defended the practice as “common in memecoin launches” – as if that makes it okay.
But here’s where it gets juicy: LIBRA isn’t Davis’s first rodeo. The project has been linked to the troubled MELANIA memecoin, and on-chain analysts have uncovered connections to serial scammers. Reports suggest the team kept around $100 million of project money. Not suspicious at all. Most investors could have protected themselves by using stop-loss orders to limit their potential losses.
The incident has exposed the wild west nature of memecoin launches. Using bots to capitalize on market inefficiencies might be common, but it’s raising serious ethical questions about market fairness. The whole debacle has left investors reeling and regulators watching closely.
The crypto community is divided. Some view sniping as a necessary evil in the volatile world of memecoins, while others see it as straight-up market manipulation.
Davis claims it helps absorb large sell orders from whales and maintains sustainable market caps. But when your token loses 95% of its value in a day, that argument doesn’t exactly hold water.
It’s just another day in crypto land, where billion-dollar market caps can vanish faster than you can say “rug pull.”
