LIBRA: a president's post and a drained pool

What happened

At 6:58 pm Argentina time on Friday, February 14, 2025, a new Solana coin called LIBRA was created. At 7:01 pm, three minutes later, Argentina's president Javier Milei posted about it to his millions of followers as a private project to boost the economy. Within 40 minutes the price went from a tiny fraction of a cent to about $5.20, and the whole coin was valued at around $4.6 billion at the top.

What the chain showed in the first hour

• One cluster held most of the supply. Within an hour, Bubblemaps flagged that linked wallets held about 82% of it.
• No plan on paper. No vesting schedule, no treasury, no roadmap.
• Odd fees. The pools earned over $25 million in fees in that first hour, which Bubblemaps said was far more than ordinary buying explains.

How the money left

The insiders did not sell in one big crash. By Bubblemaps' account, they added new pools on the exchange Meteora that held only LIBRA, and at the same time took the USDC and SOL out of the existing pools. In effect they swapped their LIBRA for the buyers' dollars and SOL, and the chart slid instead of falling off a cliff. Bubblemaps counted about $87 million out. The tracker Lookonchain counted $107 million cashed out by eight wallets tied to the team.

The two sides

Milei said he had shared the coin without properly checking the project and had no connection to it. Hayden Davis, whose firm Kelsier Ventures is reported to have created the token, called himself a facilitator rather than part of the team and denied a rug pull. He called it a plan gone miserably wrong, said he held over $100 million as a custodian, and admitted his team bought at launch, which he said was meant to protect the coin from other snipers. Bubblemaps later reported that the same funder had paid for the wallets that created LIBRA and MELANIA, the official Melania Trump coin launched about a month before.

In June 2025, Argentina's Anti-Corruption Office, part of the government, ruled that Milei had posted in a personal capacity and broken no ethics rules. In November 2025 a congressional commission, which was not a criminal inquiry, said he allegedly used his office to promote a scam. In New York, a federal judge threw out the buyers' class action against Davis, his firm and others on September 29, 2026. In Argentina, on October 23, 2026, a federal judge dismissed the criminal case against Milei, his sister and nine others, Davis among them, finding no crime. An investor appealed days later.

What a careful trader would have checked

• When the coin was made. Created three minutes before the post means the people behind it chose the start. You cannot win a race against someone who fires the starting gun.
• The bubble map. One cluster with most of the supply was visible within the hour.
• Who controls the pools. If the people behind a coin own its liquidity, they can take the other side out without ever pressing sell.
• Numbers that do not fit. $25 million in fees in an hour is a sign that something other than ordinary buying is going on.