Robinhood Chain Rug-Pull Ring Pulled $18.4M From 53 Tokens

Highlights

On-chain analyst Wazz linked 53 Robinhood Chain token launches to a single rug-pull operation.
At least $18.43 million was extracted over roughly two months, with the largest single pull worth about $3.12 million.
Each launch used between 70 and 200 coordinated wallets that captured more than 70% of token supply on the Pons V2 launchpad.
Two further serial operations, apparently unconnected to the main group, were also flagged.

Robinhood Chain has been live for less than three months, and it already has its first large-scale rug-pull syndicate. On-chain analyst Wazz published an investigation on September 27 tracing 53 token launches to the same operation, which pulled at least $18.43 million out of the network's memecoin market in roughly eight weeks.

The figure is a floor, not a final tally. Wazz described it as only what could be linked directly, and flagged two more serial extraction schemes on the chain that do not appear connected to the main group.

How the operation worked

The playbook was simple and repeated. For each launch, the group deployed a cluster of 70 to 200 wallet addresses that bought up more than 70% of a new token's supply through Pons V2, the dominant token launchpad on Robinhood Chain. With the float concentrated in insider hands, the operators then built hype around the coin, including what Wazz called fake launches: teaser campaigns meant to prime buyers before the real contract address was published.

Once retail demand arrived, the insider wallets sold into it. The proceeds did not sit idle. According to the investigation, funds from one exit were routed to the wallets seeding the next launch, sometimes within seconds, turning the scheme into a conveyor belt where every rug financed the one after it.

Attribution rested on three kinds of evidence. Wazz traced 45 of the 53 launches through direct fund flows on-chain, tied four more together through shared private keys, and connected the final four through common collector wallets where proceeds were gathered. The largest single extraction came to roughly $3.12 million.

The investigation started with a token called DEED. That token did not even crack the operation's top ten by amount extracted, which says something about how much larger some of the other pulls were.

A launchpad boom with thin guardrails

The timing tracks the chain's explosive start. Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum Orbit layer 2 that went live on July 1, saw a memecoin rush in early September. Nearly 25,000 tokens launched on Pons on September 2 alone, and daily trading volume on the launchpad reached $544 million. Pons briefly ranked among the top fee generators tracked by DefiLlama, pulling in about $5.95 million in a single day and out-earning the chain it runs on.

That kind of throughput is ideal cover for a professional operator. When tens of thousands of tokens launch in a day, a few dozen coordinated launches spread over two months barely register, and buyers chasing early entries have little time to inspect holder distribution before committing funds. Pons V2 uses a bonding curve before tokens graduate to locked Uniswap V4 pools, but a bonding curve does nothing to stop a single actor from buying most of the curve through many wallets.

Activity has cooled since the peak. Weekly fees on the Pons launchpad dropped from around $35 million to about $19.5 million by late September, even as total value locked on the chain reached roughly $1 billion on September 24. The more serious side of the network, including covered-call style markets for tokenized stocks and the broader surge in on-chain tokenized equity trading, has kept growing alongside the memecoin froth.

What it means for traders

None of this is new as a technique. Supply-sniping with wallet clusters has been a fixture of launchpad culture on Solana and Base for years, and investigators such as ZachXBT have repeatedly exposed similar money grabs elsewhere. What stands out here is the speed. A chain branded around one of the best-known retail brokerages in the United States attracted an organized extraction ring within weeks of launch, and it ran for about two months before being publicly mapped.

Neither Robinhood nor Pons had publicly responded to the findings at the time of writing. There is no sign yet of frozen funds or law enforcement involvement.

For anyone trading new launches on the chain, the practical checks are the ones this operation exploited: what share of supply sits in the top wallets, whether those wallets were funded from the same source, and whether a contract address surfaced only after a hype campaign had already run. Wazz's work suggests that a coin where dozens of fresh wallets hold most of the float within minutes of launch is a warning sign, not a bullish one. Watch next for whether Pons adds launch-level protections such as per-wallet caps, and whether the two other serial operations Wazz identified get mapped in the same detail.