Argentina's LIBRA Meme Coin: $4.4B Wipeout in Hours

Argentina's LIBRA meme coin, initially promoted by President Javier Milei, experienced a rapid collapse shortly after its launch, erasing $4.4 billion in market capitalization and impacting the broader meme coin market.

The incident began with Milei's social media post at 5:01 PM ET, promoting a token aimed at boosting the Argentine economy by funding small projects. The project's website, created hours before launch, lacked detailed tokenomics or transparent ownership information.

On-chain analysis revealed concentrated insider activity, with 82% of LIBRA tokens held in a single cluster. Insiders extracted $87.4 million within the first three hours through strategic liquidity manipulation, using Meteora's one-sided liquidity pools instead of direct market sales. The token price plummeted over 90% during this period.

Detailed wallet analysis tracked multiple coordinated trades, with several addresses converting USDC into substantial profits. 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 characterizing the incident as an attempt by political opponents to discredit him. On-chain analysts later confirmed that the LIBRA team had extracted $107 million total, marking one of the largest and fastest collapses in meme coin history.