56 launches, $15.5 million: one crew behind the Robinhood Chain rug pulls

01 · Launch nightForty minutes before DEED

On the night of September 21, a wallet on Robinhood Chain passed ETH through a second wallet to a third. The third split it among 92 fresh wallets through an airdrop contract.

Forty minutes later a memecoin called DEED went live on Pons, a launchpad on the chain. The launch transaction did two more things. It made the creator's own first buy, and it put 26 wallets on a list that let them skip the tax Pons charges early buyers.

In the next block, a single transaction bought DEED for 25 of those wallets, every one of them paid 40 minutes earlier. They took about two thirds of the supply. With the creator's buy, that was all of the coin Pons sells before moving it to Uniswap, and no one else got a single token at launch prices.

Four seconds after launch, the hand-offs began. DEED moved from those wallets to fresh ones, and the fresh wallets sold into everyone who came to buy. DEED peaked less than two hours later and then lost nearly all its value. The crew took 290 ETH from it.

That was the crew's third coin called DEED that day. Six days later, the on-chain analyst Wazz posted a thread on X about the group behind it.

I just uncovered the biggest serial Rugpulling and Extraction operation on Robinhood

Wazz on X, September 27, 2026

His post, which The Block reported the same day, tied 53 launches to one group and put its take at $18.43 million. He added that the real number was probably higher.

That post was our starting point. Bitquery indexes every transaction on Robinhood Chain, so we rebuilt the case from the chain itself. We found 56 launches, three more than Wazz counted, and a net take of about $15.5 million. We followed the money, found that most of it has not moved, and worked out who paid. Then we checked whether anyone else plays the same game on Pons. Hundreds do, most of them for small sums.

02 · The setupHow a Pons coin is meant to launch

Robinhood Chain is Robinhood's own layer-2 on Ethereum, built with Arbitrum. It has a busy memecoin scene, and most of its coins start on launchpads, sites that turn a name and a picture into a tradable coin in about a minute. Pons is the one this crew used most.

Pons sells each new coin on a bonding curve. A contract holds a billion tokens and sells them at a price that climbs with every buy, so the earliest buyers pay the least. Once the curve sells out, the coin graduates: Pons moves it into a Uniswap v4 pool where anyone can trade it. The coin's creator also earns a cut of the trading fees.

Because the first block is the cheapest, sniper bots race to buy in it. Pons fights them with a steep tax on buys in a coin's first moments, the snipe tax. But the launch transaction can name wallets that don't pay it.

That list is the whole trick. A launcher who exempts their own wallets, then buys out the curve in the next block, owns most of the coin at the floor price before the public gets a single token. Everyone who buys after that is buying from them. When the insiders sell out and the price collapses, traders call it a rug pull. Across the crew's 35 Pons launches, the snipe tax caught just 1.9 ETH.

The crew started out on Flap, another launchpad, where tax tokens charge a fee on every trade and send 90% of it to the launch wallet. It also used an older version of Pons before moving to the current one on August 12.

03 · The playbookOne night, over and over

Most of the crew's Pons launches ran like DEED. A crew wallet funds a batch of fresh wallets shortly before launch. The launch exempts them from the snipe tax. Then a bundle, one transaction that buys for many wallets at once, takes the whole curve for them in the next block.

After that comes the hand-off, which hides who holds the coin. The wallet that bought on the curve signs a message. A public sell router checks the signature, sells that wallet's tokens into the pool, and in the same transaction buys the coin back for a fresh wallet. On-chain, the fresh wallet looks like any other buyer who paid the market price. The only link back to the launch is one signed message.

The fresh wallets sell into whoever turns up, and collector wallets sweep up the ETH. Often the same collectors pay for the next launch. The crew's wallets also traded with each other, which makes a coin look busier than it is. They signed about a quarter of all the ETH volume in the 56 coins, and 60% of DEED's. Fake volume is common on this chain.

On three days, the crew launched one name three times: PINK on September 7, CRUMBS on September 8 and DEED on September 21. Each time the first two drew little, and the third made the money.

04 · 56 launchesThree months, one money trail

The crew's first coin, MONSIEUR, launched on the evening of July 10. Its last, UNREAL, came on September 23. It launched more coins each month, and the money grew faster: about three quarters of it came in September.

Two September launches made the most, about $2.8 million each. Between them they took more than a third of the total.

What ties these coins together is money. The same wallets bought early in launch after launch, and the same crew wallets funded them. ETH swept from one launch often paid for the next. For 43 of the 56 launches, the link is that direct. The other 13, all but one in July, rest on a thinner thread: wallets funded by the crew that traded in the first hour. Every trade behind these figures is in Bitquery's DEX data.

05 · The claimWhat Wazz got right

Where a number can be checked exactly, the chain backs Wazz. The Block named 92 DEED wallets, and our count of what they got from DEED trades matches its figure to the second decimal. So does Wazz's figure for LONGI, a July coin.

Our total is lower, $15.5 million net against his $16.78 million. Some of his per-coin figures run higher than ours, REAL and WAY among them. We count only what the crew's wallets actually took from other traders, plus the fees and tax paid to them. Our launch count is three higher, and one of the extra launches, UNREAL, came two days after his cut-off.

He also puts $18.11 million still unspent in 44 wallets. We can tie about $11.4 million of unspent money to the crew's own trading.

06 · Who paidTwo kinds of buyer

Two kinds of buyer paid for all this. The first came through apps. Tens of thousands of wallets got the crew's coins through Relay, the cross-chain service that fills orders for the FOMO app and wallets like it. Those buyers paid $18.2 million and got back less than half of it when they sold from their smart wallets, accounts run by code rather than a single key. That is a net loss of about $9.4 million.

It is the same people on both sides: nearly nine in ten of the smart wallets that sold these coins had bought them through Relay.

The second kind traded from their own wallets. Two in three of those wallets lost money, though most lost little: the median loss was $36. Some got out in time. Taken together, these wallets came out $3.9 million down.

Add the two up and buyers lost about $13.3 million. Count it the other way, from the crew's wallets, and the crew's trading take lands within 1% of that.

Buyers had very little time. Half the coins peaked within 15 minutes of launch, and on most launches the crew had done half its trading by then. The median coin then fell 99% from its peak.

07 · The moneyMost of the money is still there

Most of it never left. On September 8 and 10, crew wallets moved about 2,450 ETH into ten fresh wallets on Robinhood Chain, a few hundred ETH each, and two more wallets got ETH later in the month. Almost none of it has moved since.

Add the ETH still in the crew's own wallets and the money it bridged to Ethereum, and about $11.4 million sits still, nearly two thirds of the take measured in ETH. No issuer can freeze ETH or DAI. Each of these wallets can be watched, and followed if it moves, with the Bitquery MCP.

Some of it did leave the chain. From mid-August, eight crew wallets bridged 1,080 ETH and some USDG, a dollar stablecoin, through Relay. Almost every deposit can be matched to a payout on the other side, and six of the eight wallets bridged to their own address on Ethereum. A few hundred more ETH went out through Relay on September 24.

DEED's funding key, the wallet that started the payments on launch night, bridged its ETH to Ethereum three days after the launch. The wallet that received it swapped the ETH for DAI, another dollar stablecoin, and a day later moved all 231,033 DAI to a new wallet, where it sits. The Block reported this DAI, and the amounts match.

The same keys turn up on both chains: six of the Ethereum wallets holding crew money are also holding wallets on Robinhood Chain, at the same address. Some holding wallets also have ETH on Ethereum that came in during August from wallets we could not trace back. That is another 573 ETH, which we leave out of our count.

Some money did move on. About half a million dollars in stablecoins left two wallets, most of it back through Relay. The exits also drew address-poisoning spam: look-alike addresses sending fake DAI and USDT, hoping the owner copies the wrong one next time.

The very first money came from Solana. Relay's public order record shows about $7,300 in SOL leaving a Solana wallet on the evening of July 10 and arriving four seconds later as ETH at the crew's first funding wallet on Robinhood Chain. A second payment of the same size followed. Fourteen minutes after the first, the crew launched its first coin.

Since Wazz posted, the crew has launched nothing new, and its wallets have hardly moved.

08 · The copycatsNot the only crew

To see who else does this, we scanned every coin that graduated from the current Pons in August and September, nearly 10,000 in all. On about one in ten, five or more wallets exempt from the snipe tax bought at least half the supply before graduation.

For the ones that traded against ETH, we worked out each launch's insiders and what they made, the same way as for the crew, and grouped launches run by the same wallets.

Wazz called this crew the biggest on Robinhood, and on Pons the numbers agree: it took more than all the other groups put together. The rest were small. No other group reached $1 million, and the median launch made its insiders about $5,400. On about one launch in five, the insiders lost money. This count covers only the crew's launches on the current Pons, so it comes in below our $15.5 million.

09 · The toolsPublic tools, private money

The move is easy to copy because the tools are public.

The bundler that bought DEED's curve, the sell router and a wallet factory behind many of the crew's contract wallets were all deployed by one address in August. The airdrop contract that paid the 92 wallets came from another deployer, on July 1. Anyone can use them. The router's hand-off alone has been used by more than 56,000 wallets.

We found no money moving between the crew and the address that made those tools, the Pons deployer, Flap's deployer or Flap's fee wallet. Anyone who uses the tools leaves the same traces, which is why the pattern alone proves nothing. The money does.

For a buyer, the warning shows up in the first block. When a coin's curve sells out to tax-exempt wallets before anyone else can buy, those wallets hold most of the supply, and everyone who buys later is buying from them.

10 · The limitsWhat the numbers rest on

The $15.5 million is what the crew's wallets took from other traders on these coins, plus the creator fees and Flap tax paid to its launch wallets.

It depends on which wallets count as the crew's. Leave out the ones tied only by funding from a crew wallet, and the take drops to about $12.4 million. The July launches rest on those wallets. Wazz's July figures, reached on his own, point the same way: LONGI's matches ours exactly, and the others we checked are within about a fifth.

Many insider wallets are smart-contract wallets made with the public tools. We count them as the crew's because crew wallets funded them and they signed the hand-offs. If a tool held their keys for someone else, the chain would not show it.

We count a holding wallet only if nearly all of its ETH came from the crew. Buyers are counted by wallet, and one person can hold several. Dollar figures use each day's ETH price, in line with our price data.

So is it one crew? On the chain's evidence, yes. The same wallets and keys run through all of these launches, and money swept from one launch paid for the next. $15.5 million came out, and about two thirds of it still sits where anyone can see it. The chain cannot say who holds those keys. An exchange that receives any of this money can.

How we did it: we started from Wazz's post and the DEED launch The Block described, then worked outward launch by launch through shared wallets and funding. For each launch we found the insiders from the launch itself and followed their money on Robinhood Chain and Ethereum, using Bitquery's own archives, to September 28.