An anti-sniping system is supposed to stop insiders and bots from owning a token before ordinary buyers can react.
On Robinhood Chain’s Pons V2 launchpad, the protection includes an exception: a token creator can exempt a group of wallets from the opening tax so a legitimate team can bundle its initial buys.
An onchain investigation now alleges that the same feature was repeatedly used to do almost exactly what the anti-sniping mechanism was built to prevent.
Pseudonymous analyst Wazz linked 53 launches to one alleged operation and estimated at least $18.43 million was extracted between July 10 and September 21. The Block independently reviewed 10 of the launches and confirmed the launch mechanics and one of the traced funding paths, but did not independently reproduce the full $18.43 million total.
The Protection Works Differently Depending on Who You Are
Pons V2 documentation says a new launch opens with a buy tax that starts at 99% and decays to zero over about five seconds. The idea is simple: an external bot can still buy first, but doing so should be economically painful.
The creator, the creator-fee recipient and as many as 32 additional addresses can be exempted at launch. The documentation describes that feature as a way for a team to bundle opening purchases across several wallets.
The exemption list is fixed at creation. That makes it transparent on-chain, but it also creates a privileged group whose economics are completely different from everyone else’s during the most sensitive seconds of a token’s life.
The Block Verified the Pattern on 10 Launches
For nine Pons V2 launches from late August onward that The Block reviewed, creators exempted 15 to 25 wallets from the opening tax. One to three blocks later, a single transaction bought tokens for those wallets simultaneously.
Those opening purchases emptied the bonding curve and pushed the token into its Uniswap v4 pool. The creator plus the exempt wallets ended the opening sequence holding between 82% and 86% of supply.
The most useful detail is not the word rug pull. It is that the mechanics were visible and permitted by the launch configuration.
Pons describes the exemption path as sanctioned team bundling. The alleged abuse shows why a legitimate administrative exception can also become a concentration tool if buyers do not understand how much supply the privileged wallets can acquire before public participants enter.
Robinhood Is Not the Issuer of These Tokens
The distinction matters because the name Robinhood Chain can make every token on it sound more official than it is.
Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum layer 2 built with Arbitrum technology. Permissionless activity on the network is not the same thing as a token being issued, endorsed or guaranteed by Robinhood.
Optimisus made the same distinction when CASHCAT became the chain’s breakout memecoin. The token used a piece of Robinhood history and traded on Robinhood Chain, but that did not make it a company-issued asset.
The network has also attracted infrastructure and launchpad activity rapidly. Optimisus covered 0x providing swap liquidity and cross-chain access from day one and, more recently, a dedicated ecosystem zone built around Robinhood Chain assets.
A Launchpad Can Be Permissionless and Still Have Information Asymmetry
Crypto often treats on-chain transparency as if it automatically creates a fair market.
It does not. A transaction can be publicly visible and still be economically impossible for a normal buyer to interpret quickly enough.
A retail user arriving seconds after launch may see a token with a completed bonding curve, an active pool and apparent demand. Unless the interface surfaces the exemption list and the resulting supply concentration, that user may not realize most of the token was acquired by a coordinated group under a different tax regime.
That is not a blockchain transparency problem. It is a product-design problem: the raw facts exist on-chain, but the interface does not necessarily translate them into risk information at the moment a buyer needs it.
The Fix Is Not Necessarily Removing Exemptions
There are legitimate reasons a launch team may want several addresses to participate atomically. Removing that ability entirely could simply push the same behavior into more complicated contracts or private allocation structures.
A stronger solution is to make the privilege legible.
Launch interfaces could prominently show the number of exempt addresses, their combined opening supply share, creator-linked wallets, creator tax and any bundled opening transaction before a buyer confirms a trade. Wallets and aggregators could warn when a privileged cohort controls a majority of circulating supply.
That would not prevent bad tokens. It would make the launch mechanics harder to hide behind the appearance of a fair public curve.
Robinhood Chain’s early memecoin boom showed how quickly speculative liquidity can bring users onto a new network. This investigation shows the other side of that growth: a chain can scale faster than the risk language around the products built on top of it.
This is not financial advice.
Sources
- The Block — Onchain analyst links $18.4M in Robinhood Chain memecoin extractions — Independent review confirming launch mechanics on 10 tokens and one traced funding path; the outlet did not independently replicate the full alleged total.
- Pons V2 documentation — Snipe protection and exemptions — Primary technical documentation for the 99% decaying opening tax and creator-defined exemption list.
