Nansen: 86% of traders lost $251M in total on the Solana memecoin Libra that Argentine President Milei promoted, while the remaining traders profited $180M
- Citing onchain data, Nansen Research said that through Tuesday, 86% of traders lost a total of $251 million on the LIBRA token …
Context & Ripple Effects
Milei’s now-deleted promotion was followed by LIBRA’s rapid rise and collapse; this analysis puts a wallet-level loss distribution behind that earlier boom-and-crash episode.
The result also fits subsequent reporting that retail traders often absorbed losses in Solana memecoin markets, rather than sharing evenly in the gains created during a token’s brief surge.
First-order effects
- Nansen’s data indicates that most LIBRA traders were left with aggregate losses of $251 million, while a smaller set of traders captured $180 million in profits.
- The figures sharpen the economic consequences of Milei’s promotion for affected holders and add scrutiny to LIBRA’s trading dynamics.
Second-order effects
- Onchain analytics becomes more central to evaluating memecoin promotions: headline market-cap moves alone obscure which participants realized gains and which remained exposed to the collapse.
- The uneven outcome reinforces reputational risk for prominent endorsers and for Solana-linked memecoin venues when politically associated tokens draw retail participation.
Third-order effects
- If similar distributions recur, political-brand memecoins may deepen the crypto legitimacy gap by making public endorsements look less like market access and more like highly asymmetric speculation.
- Repeated wallet-level evidence of concentrated gains could increase pressure for clearer disclosure and accountability around token promotion, though the corpus does not establish what policy response would follow.
The trend: LIBRA is part of a broader pattern in which celebrity- and politician-linked memecoins generate concentrated gains for a minority while many later buyers bear losses.