Milei memecoin fallout snowballs as Solana DeFi leader resigns

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A Solana DeFi person resigns amid the LIBRA token scandal.
Privacy protocol Railgun thwarts a hacker.
World Liberty Financial plans a crypto stockpile.

Ben Chow resigns

A Solana DeFi person resigned aft being implicated successful the $4.5 cardinal pump-and-dump of a memecoin promoted by Argentine President Javier Milei.

Meteora protocol co-founder Ben Chow distanced himself from Hayden Davis, a crypto promoter who admitted to front-running the LIBRA token and sharing accusation astir its motorboat with insiders, yet profiting $100 cardinal astatine the disbursal of investors.

“Neither I nor the Meteora squad compromised the $LIBRA motorboat by leaking information, nor did we purchase, receive, oregon negociate immoderate tokens,” Chow said successful an X post.

On Friday, Milei promoted the LIBRA token successful a since-deleted post.

LIBRA soared to a $4.5 cardinal marketplace worth earlier crashing much than 95%.

Chow’s resignation comes aft a leaked conversation, archetypal reported by SolanaFloor, successful which the co-founder was confronted astir his engagement with LIBRA.

Moty Povolotski, laminitis of Solana app DefiTuna, asked Chow if helium had a woody with Davis to assistance him supply liquidity for rigged memecoin launches successful speech for a cut.

“What? No man, that’s not existent astatine all,” Chow said.

Meteora is simply a DeFi protocol that helps users motorboat and supply liquidity for caller memecoins.

It was co-founded by Chow and Ming Ng, who besides co-founded the $2.5 cardinal trading aggregator Jupiter.

In an X post, Ng said Chow had shown a “lack of judgement” arsenic Meteora’s task lead.

“This is unluckily unacceptable. Ben understands this, and has chosen to resign,” Ng said.

Railgun thwarts hacker

Railgun is proving onchain privateness doesn’t person to payment criminals.

On Thursday, ZkLend, a lending protocol connected the Starknet blockchain, suffered a $9.5 cardinal hack.

The hacker transferred the crypto to the Ethereum blockchain, and past attempted to transportation it again utilizing Railgun, a protocol that allows users to interruption the concatenation of traceability betwixt blockchain transactions.

That would person allowed the hacker to proceed moving the stolen crypto crossed the blockchain oregon to perchance transportation it to an speech unnoticed, wherever it could beryllium exchanged for cash.

Instead, the Railgun protocol refused the hacker’s request.

DeFi information experts tin emblem transgression crypto addresses to Railgun. Once accepted, the protocol won’t fto the code usage the protocol’s privateness functionality.

“If they are [ill-gotten], the lone enactment the atrocious histrion tin execute is to nonstop backmost to their originating address,” Alan Scott, co-founder of the Railgun project, told DL News.

WLF’s crypto stockpile

Trump-backed DeFi protocol World Liberty Financial said Wednesday it plans to make a strategical reserve of integer assets.

Dubbed Macro Strategy, the money is designed to “bolster starring projects similar Bitcoin and Ethereum” and emerging DeFi opportunities.

Last week, World Liberty co-founder Chase Herro said the onchain stockpile volition amusement the company’s committedness to the crypto industry.

How it volition bash truthful is unclear. World Liberty hasn’t been a semipermanent holder of its crypto stash, astatine slightest not connected its publically known wallet addresses.

World Liberty has acquired cryptocurrencies of respective salient projects, including Tron, Move, Ethena, and Chainlink.

The announcement comes aft a Blockworks investigation recovered World Liberty Financial courted crypto teams for token swap deals.