Inside the $18 Million Rug Pull Rocking Robinhood Chain

What happened

A pseudonymous onchain analyst who goes by Wazz says one group extracted at least $18.43 million from 53 memecoin launches on Robinhood Chain within a two-month period. Wazz posted the findings on X on Sunday, September 27, 2026. The analyst linked the wallets by tracing how funds moved between launches.

Wazz used three methods to tie the launches together. Forty-five were connected through funding trails, where proceeds from one launch financed the wallet behind the next. Four shared the same private keys signing funding batches, and four more were linked through a shared collector wallet. In some cases, a transfer happened only seconds before the same funding key was used again.

The supply pattern repeated across launches. Creators can exempt up to 32 wallets from the snipe tax on Pons, the network's dominant launchpad. In nine launches studied closely, Wazz says creators whitelisted between 15 and 25 addresses, then bought tokens for all of them in one transaction. That purchase emptied the bonding curve and moved each token to a public liquidity pool, leaving the creator and whitelisted addresses with between 82% and 86% of circulating supply. All nine opening buys ran through the same unverified contract, created on August 28, 2026.

Why it matters

Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum layer 2 network built on Arbitrum technology. Robinhood Markets launched it on July 1, 2026, at an event in London. The company built the chain for financial services and tokenized real-world assets, including stock tokens tied to public companies. Memecoins quickly took over much of the early trading instead, and most tokens launched through Pons, the dominant launchpad on the network.

Pons sells new tokens on a bonding curve and charges a snipe tax on buys made in the first seconds after a token launches, starting at 99%. Wazz says the exemption feature was used to concentrate supply. No individual has been publicly named or charged in connection with the scheme, and nothing in the report suggests Robinhood or Pons had any role in designing or running it. Much of the identified funds remain in ETH, which makes them harder to freeze.

What the data shows

Wazz estimates at least $18.43 million was extracted but says the figure could be higher, because the analysis only covers activity that could be directly connected onchain. The analyst put CRUMBS at $3.12 million and PINK at $1.44 million. In one traced example, 98 wallets associated with DRAFT moved 179.88 ETH into a hub, the hub funded a wallet that sent 20 ETH to the DEED funding key, and 16 seconds later that key signed DEED's funding batch. Almost every launch was sniped for more than 70% of the token supply, and launches were often bundled with between 70 and 200 wallets. Robinhood has reported around $50 million in revenue from the network to date.

Background

The investigation began with the DEED launch, although Wazz said DEED was not among the 10 launches with the highest amount extracted. The analyst identified three PINK launches, three CRUMBS launches and three DEED launches linked to the same operation.

What is still unclear

• Wazz flagged at least two other serial deployment operations that could not yet be directly linked to this network.
• Every wallet involved has been tagged in a personal database, and the analyst says the total could be higher because only activity they could directly connect onchain was counted.
• The reports do not say whether any of the funds held in ETH have been recovered or frozen, and no charges have been announced.

Questions readers ask

Sources

1. 1 The BlockOnchain analyst links $18.4 million in Robinhood Chain memecoin extractions to single rug-... · 27 Sep, 22:02 UTC
2. 2 CoinCentralInside the $18 Million Rug Pull Rocking Robinhood Chain · 28 Sep, 07:25 UTC
3. 3 CryptoPotato$18.4M Allegedly Extracted Across 53 Robinhood Chain Token Launches · 28 Sep, 09:00 UTC