$LIBRA: Milei's Post, a $4.5B Peak and $251M in Trader Losses

At 7:01 on the evening of Friday 14 February 2025, Javier Milei, the president of Argentina, posted a message to his 3.8 million followers on X. "Liberal Argentina is growing," it began. A "private project" called Viva la Libertad would "encourage the growth of the Argentine economy by funding small Argentine businesses and startups. The world wants to invest in Argentina." Below it were a link and a 44-character code: the address of a brand new digital token called $LIBRA.

Forty-three minutes later the token was trading at $4.55, and the market valued the whole supply at about $4.5 billion, according to the blockchain analytics firm Nansen. Within a few hours it had fallen by roughly 94%. Milei deleted the post. Nansen later calculated that 86% of the traders it tracked had lost money, a combined $251 million, while a smaller group made $180 million.

What was being sold

$LIBRA was a memecoin: a token with no company, profits or assets behind it, whose price depends only on how many people want it. Launching one is closer to printing raffle tickets than to listing a share. There is no prospectus and no regulator checking the paperwork. Anyone can create a billion tokens in minutes.

For people to buy, a token needs a trading pool, known in crypto as "liquidity". Think of it as the float of shares and cash a market maker holds so that buyers and sellers can trade instantly. The issuer puts tokens in; buyers put in dollars, here USDC (a digital dollar) and SOL (the currency of the Solana network the token ran on). Whoever supplied the pool can, in most set-ups, withdraw what is in it, including the cash buyers have paid in.

$LIBRA was created at 6:38 that evening, Buenos Aires time, according to Nansen and a later report by Argentina's Federal Police. Its pools sat on Meteora, a Solana trading platform. The Federal Police report found that a single wallet belonging to the team of Hayden Davis, an American who ran a firm called Kelsier Ventures, held primary control over all one billion tokens. The token was listed on no exchange, the crypto equivalent of a broker, when Milei posted the address. The first one, the Argentine exchange Ripio, added it at 9:40 that night.

Where the money went

A blockchain is a public ledger, so every transfer can be followed, and the firms that do this for a living arrived at similar numbers. Chainalysis found, as Reuters reported, that eight wallets which had received tokens directly from the creator withdrew about $99 million in USDC and SOL from the pools. The tracking account Lookonchain put the figure at $107 million, and Bubblemaps said about 82% of the supply sat in a tight, unlocked cluster that could be sold at any time. Bubblemaps described the method: the insiders added pools containing only $LIBRA while removing the USDC and SOL that buyers had deposited. In stock market terms, the market maker kept taking the cash out of the order book and leaving only more shares behind.

©CMZ chart. Data: Nansen, Lookonchain, Chainalysis, US court

Davis did not dispute that he controlled the money. In a video interview with the YouTube investigator Coffeezilla on 17 February he called himself the launch adviser, said about $100 million sat "in an account that I'm the custodian of", and said: "It's not a rug. It's a plan gone miserably wrong." A "rug pull" is crypto slang for promoters draining a project and leaving buyers with worthless tokens. On X he wrote that he had not taken, and would not take, any of the funds for his personal benefit. He also told Coffeezilla his team had "sniped", or bought the instant trading opened, both $LIBRA and the MELANIA memecoin launched a month earlier, according to CoinDesk. He said Milei's side had asked him to delay putting money back into the pool while they waited for a second presidential video that never came.

©Photo: social media

What Milei said

Within hours Milei deleted the post and wrote a new one. "I did not know the details of the project and after learning about it, I decided not to continue spreading it," he wrote, in Reuters' translation, adding that he had no connection with the company. On 17 February he told the TN channel: "I didn't promote it, I spread it." He said he had acted in good faith and taken no money, and he compared the losses to a casino: "If you go to a casino and lose money, what's the complaint? It's a problem between private parties." He disputed reports of 44,000 buyers, putting the number at about 5,000 at most, with "very remote chances" that many were Argentine.

A statement from the Office of the President attributed Viva la Libertad to KIP Protocol, a company run by the Singaporean entrepreneur Julian Peh, whose representatives it said had met Milei on 19 October 2024, with Davis to supply the technology. Peh said "nobody has profited from this", and KIP denied that the project was discussed at that meeting. Ben Chow, co-founder and chief executive of Meteora, resigned within days. Meteora denied any insider trading and hired the law firm Fenwick & West to review the launch.

The trail since

Milei and Davis had met before. Davis came to Buenos Aires in October 2024 for a Tech Forum organised by Mauricio Novelli, a trader who had known Milei since at least 2021, and met the president at the Casa Rosada on 30 January 2025. In March 2026, forensic experts from Datip, the prosecution service's technology unit, recovered from Novelli's seized phone several drafts of a "confidential agreement" under which Davis would advise the Argentine government on blockchain, unpaid, around the date of that meeting, La Nación and Protos reported. No signed copy has been found. La Nación reported that on the day of the meeting Davis sent two transfers of $499,999 each; Protos reported that about $1 million in USDC travelled from Davis-linked wallets through a retiree's wallet to Novelli's.

The same phone showed eight contacts between Novelli and Milei on 14 February 2025, at 6:44, 6:54, 6:56, 6:58, 7:03, 7:32, 10:00 and 10:05 in the evening, according to Infobae; The New York Times reported the call logs in April 2026. What was said is not known. Milei has denied any agreement with Davis. The General Secretariat of the Presidency, run by his sister Karina Milei, told the prosecutor it had "no records, entries or documentation" of one.

None of this has been tested in court. Nobody has been convicted, and as of September 2026 no one has been formally questioned as a suspect in Argentina. Milei has not been charged.