Analyst links $18.4m Robinhood Chain memecoin extractions to one operation
Onchain analyst Wazz says a single group extracted at least $18.43 million from 53 memecoin launches on Robinhood Chain, with The Block confirming how 10 of them were sniped.
Key points
- Wazz said the operation extracted at least $18.43 million from 53 token launches between July 10 and Sept. 21.
- The Block confirmed 10 of the launches were sniped, but did not replicate the $18.43 million total.
- Creators waived Pons V2's 99% anti-sniping tax for 15 to 25 wallets, which then bought most of each supply.
- CRUMBS was the largest extraction at $3.12 million, followed by LEGS at $2.9 million and PINK at $1.44 million.
- The Block traced 179.88 ETH from DRAFT wallets to funding for a DEED launch 40 minutes before it went live.
A pseudonymous onchain analyst known as Wazz has linked at least $18.43 million in memecoin extractions on Robinhood Chain to what they describe as a single operation, according to a thread published to X on Sunday. The analyst said the group took the money from 53 token launches between July 10 and Sept. 21. The Block reviewed Robinhood Chain data and confirmed how 10 of the launches were sniped, though it did not independently replicate the total figure.
Wazz said nearly every launch was sniped for 70% or more of its supply by bundles of 70 to 200 wallets. Most of the tokens went through Pons V2, the leading launchpad on Robinhood Chain, which Robinhood launched on July 1 as an Ethereum layer 2 built with Arbitrum's technology. The analyst linked 45 launches by tracing payments from one launch's collection wallet to the next token's funding wallet, four more through private keys signing batch funding transactions, and another four through a shared collector wallet.
Pons V2 sells new tokens along a bonding curve and charges a 99% snipe tax on buys in the first seconds after launch, falling to zero in about five seconds, according to its documentation. Creators can waive the tax for a team bundling opening buys across up to 32 addresses. The Block found that in nine launches from late August, creators waived the tax for 15 to 25 wallets, and one to three blocks later a single transaction bought tokens for all of them, emptying the bonding curve and pushing each token into a Uniswap v4 pool.
One operation alleged
In those launches, the creator and exempt wallets ended the opening transactions holding 82% to 86% of supply, matching the shares Wazz concluded were sniped. All nine opening buys went through one unverified contract created on Aug. 28. Wazz told The Block the contract belongs to a commercial bundling tool with many unrelated users, and 25 of the 53 launches on the list used it. The Block could not determine who operates the tool.
Wazz cited DEED, the launch that prompted the investigation, as an example, saying proceeds from an earlier token, DRAFT, paid for it. The Block traced the flow onchain and confirmed each transaction. On Sept. 14, 98 wallets that had held DRAFT sent 179.88 ETH to one address within three seconds, which forwarded the full amount to a wallet beginning 0x9d06. On Sept. 21, that wallet sent 50 ETH onward, and 15.98 ETH was batch transferred to 50 addresses, including DEED's creator and the wallets exempted from the snipe tax. DEED went live 40 minutes later, with those wallets holding 86% of supply.
The 92 wallets funded in that batch received 130.75 ETH from selling DEED into its Uniswap pool, starting one second after launch, and DEED's creator pulled 69.06 ETH in creator fees from Pons' escrow contract, onchain data shows. That totals about 199.8 ETH, or roughly $535,000 at current prices, against the 228.92 ETH Wazz lists for DEED. On Sept. 24, the 0x9d06 wallet deposited about 86.5 ETH into a Relay bridge contract, which delivered about 86.3 ETH to Ethereum, swapped for about 231,000 DAI and moved to a new address.
How the sniping worked
Wazz said most of the money sits in ETH and cannot be frozen, and told The Block they valued each launch at ETH's price around the time of its launch or sale. CRUMBS was the largest extraction in dollar terms at $3.12 million, followed by LEGS at $2.9 million and PINK at $1.44 million. Fees from Pons drove Robinhood Chain to a record $6 million in a single day earlier this month. The Block has reached out to Pons and Robinhood for comment.