DEED, a token launched on Robinhood Chain’s Pons platform on Sept. 22, briefly reached a market capitalization of $4.23 million before losing more than 90% of its value in less than a day.
That alone would not have stood out on Robinhood Chain, which has turned into one of the busiest token-launch venues since going live in July. Data from independent tracker pons ledger shows that Pons alone has produced nearly 900,000 tokens. What drew scrutiny was what came next: after tracing DEED’s funding path upstream, onchain analyst Wazz said the token was part of a repeat launch-and-exit pattern that linked dozens of offerings over roughly two months and extracted about $18.43 million in total.
Funds from one launch allegedly paid for the next one
DEED presented itself as a real-estate vault on Robinhood Chain and said holders could share rental income from an apartment portfolio after costs. When trading opened on Sept. 22, the token quickly gained traction.
By Sept. 23, Onchain Lens said DEED appeared to be a suspected rug pull. It reported that 110 linked wallets at one point controlled about 86% of the token supply and withdrew about $700,000. The creator also collected 68.5 ETH in creator fees, worth about $188,900 at the time. DEED’s market capitalization had already fallen to roughly $55,000, down about 98.7% from its peak.
Wazz said DEED was not an isolated case. In his reconstruction, the funding behind DEED came from another token previously issued by the same group.
The chain begins with DRAFT, a token launched about a week earlier. On the night of Sept. 14, 98 wallets holding DRAFT sent 179.88 ETH to the same address within three seconds. The funds were then forwarded in full to a wallet beginning with 0x9d06, where they stayed for a week.
Early on Sept. 22, the money started moving again to prepare DEED’s launch. Wallet 0x9d06 first sent out 50 ETH. Two minutes later, 20 ETH from that amount reached DEED’s funding wallet. Sixteen seconds after that, the funding wallet used a batch transfer to distribute 15.98 ETH to 50 addresses, including the DEED creator and 25 wallets that had been exempted in advance from the platform’s anti-sniping tax.
Forty minutes later, DEED opened for trading. The first buy after launch built positions for those 25 tax-exempt wallets in one move. Once the purchase was complete, the creator and that set of wallets held about 86% of total supply.
One second later, the selling started. The tokens were then spread across more wallets and sold out in stages. By the time Onchain Lens published its warning, the extraction cycle had already run its course.
Wazz said the handoff from DRAFT to DEED was only one example. He found the same rhythm repeated again and again over more than two months.
In the pattern he described, the group prepared dozens of wallets before each launch and placed them on a tax-exempt list. Once the token went live, those wallets took most of the supply within one or two blocks. When outside buyers entered, the holdings were sold gradually. The proceeds were then consolidated into a small number of addresses and reused as seed capital for the next token.
Following that money trail, Wazz linked 45 launches together. He also found four launches whose seed funding was signed by the same private key, and another four where selling proceeds ended up in the same consolidation address. In the end, he attributed 53 launches between July 10 and Sept. 21 to the same group. Most of them were issued through Pons V2.
The group also appears to have reused token names to amplify attention. The same 0x9d06 wallet that funded DEED also funded another token with the same DEED name on the same day. PINK, CRUMBS and DEED were each issued three times within roughly a day. Wazz said the tactic appears to use same-name tokens to absorb traffic generated by prelaunch hype before the “real” contract address is circulated.
His estimate for the 53 launches is about $18.43 million extracted from the market. He also noted that this figure reflects funds taken from trading counterparties, which included retail traders, other market participants and bots. It does not equal aggregate retail losses.
DEED was not the largest example by size. Wazz said CRUMBS and LEGS generated the biggest extraction totals, at about $3.12 million and $2.9 million respectively. Most of the funds, he added, remain onchain in ETH and cannot be frozen.
Pons V2 blocked bots with taxes, but exempt wallets were still able to get in first
The tax-exempt list was central to the strategy described above. It comes from a rule set that Pons introduced to reduce bot sniping at launch.
Under Pons V2, a new token first trades on a bonding curve where the price rises as buying increases. Once the curve is sold out, the token automatically graduates into a Uniswap v4 pool, with liquidity permanently locked. Pons documentation says graduated tokens do not have a liquidity-removal function.
That setup closes off the familiar path where a project team removes liquidity and disappears. It does not determine who gets the tokens at launch.
The first few seconds are the easiest moment for sniping bots to step in. Pons V2 responds with an anti-sniping tax. Early buys can be taxed as high as 99%, with the rate decaying to zero over about five seconds. At the one-second mark, the tax is about 25%. At two seconds, it is about 3%.
The tax is steep enough to make typical sniping unprofitable, but the rules leave one opening. The token-launch address and the creator-fee address are automatically exempt, and the launcher can also designate up to 32 additional exempt wallets during token creation. Pons says in its documentation that this is meant to help teams split launch buys across several wallets.
In practice, that means a launcher can preload their own wallets onto the list and build positions tax-free during the exact few seconds when everyone else still faces heavy fees.
In the launches listed by Wazz, nine cases since late August followed the same structure. The creator exempted 15 to 25 wallets from the anti-sniping tax, then used a single transaction to buy for them in a batch, empty the curve, and push the token into the Uniswap pool. After launch, the creator and the exempt wallets held between 82% and 86% of supply.
Those nine launch buys shared another feature: they all passed through the same unverified contract created on Aug. 28. Wazz said the contract belongs to a commercial bundling tool used by many unrelated users. It appeared in 25 of the 53 launches.
He also said he had identified at least two other serial-launch groups, though he could not directly connect them to this case.
GoPlus described another high-risk meme fraud factory on Robinhood Chain
On Sept. 28, security firm GoPlus said it had found a high-risk fraudulent meme factory on Robinhood Chain that handled more than $9 million in turnover over the past 30 days and involved hundreds of fraudulent meme tokens.
This operation used a different route. According to GoPlus, it distributed tokens to large numbers of fresh addresses with only four to 11 prior transactions, then sold in segments through Pons V2 helper contracts and Uniswap routing to create the appearance of multiple independent traders.
Across 10 samples listed by GoPlus, each token used only three to eight new wallets and extracted 2 ETH to 13 ETH per token. The amount per token was not large, but the selling proceeds still flowed into a consolidation address and were then used to fund the next round.
GoPlus said the last 400 transactions associated with that consolidation address added up to about 3,589 ETH in inflows and outflows, worth about $9.49 million. It stressed that this was two-way turnover, not net profit.
GoPlus said both cases used large numbers of wallets to hide the true concentration of holdings, and neither relied on liquidity withdrawal or disabled selling. At present, it said there is no evidence the two operations belong to the same group.
The backdrop matters. According to pons ledger, Pons issued about 899,000 tokens from about 453,000 addresses between July 13 and Sept. 27. Only about 1.5% of V2 tokens sold out their bonding curves and graduated successfully.
On Sept. 8, the day issuance peaked, about 27,000 addresses launched tokens. Roughly 90% of them had never launched a token before. In an environment where tens of thousands of new tokens and new addresses appear every day, dozens of one-off wallets are hard for ordinary buyers to spot.
Stock wrappers, property themes and creator fees turned issuance into a business
DEED’s apartment-vault narrative was not unusual in the set of tokens Wazz reviewed.
His list also included names such as Pink Sheets, Stock Miner, Openbell and EQUITY BROKERS. Pink Sheets is the old name for the U.S. OTC pink-sheet market. CRUMBS, the token with the highest extraction total, claimed it could turn shopping receipts into stock-token rewards.
That framing lines up with Robinhood Chain’s own positioning around tokenized equities. Pons V2 also allows launchers to price new tokens directly in stock tokens.
GoPlus had previously scanned Pons V2 issuance records and found that in an 11-day span, about 32% of roughly 324,000 token launches were priced directly in official stock tokens. Meme coins paired with stock tokens had already become a common format.
JINQIAN pushed that theme further. In early September, the meme token launched on Robinhood Chain through a private issuance factory, paired against a FAMI token using Farmmi’s stock ticker. Farmmi is a Nasdaq-listed mushroom supplier, and the name JINQIAN comes from a mushroom mentioned in the company’s annual report.
Nansen said that FAMI was not an official stock token and had no link to Farmmi shares. The name, however, was enough to invite market association. During U.S. stock trading on Sept. 2, Farmmi shares rose as much as about 350% intraday.
A previous GoPlus risk report on Robinhood Chain said the entire supply of that FAMI token was controlled by the operator. JINQIAN could only trade against FAMI, so every retail buyer who wanted JINQIAN first had to buy FAMI from the operator. After interest faded, the operator withdrew about $2.06 million in stablecoins.
Creator fees added another revenue stream on top of token selling.
On Pons, most trading fees are paid to the token creator side. As of Sept. 27, pons ledger showed cumulative fees of about $180 million on the platform, with about $147 million flowing to creators.
For groups that launch token after token, that is income separate from unloading inventory. In the GoPlus samples, revenue from two tokens came from repeated creator-fee claims that were later consolidated. Since launching a token is cheap, one or two hot tokens can generate enough selling proceeds and creator fees to cover the cost of many earlier attempts.
Issuance volume is falling as Robinhood Chain approaches a test period
The issuance frenzy has already started to cool. Pons ledger data shows daily token launches on Pons fell from about 36,000 on Sept. 8 to about 5,400 on Sept. 27, while revenue and fees also declined sharply.
The next several days could become a test period for Robinhood Chain. On Sept. 29, the gas subsidy provided by Robinhood Wallet for onchain swaps is set to expire. Whether the chain can keep users and trading volume after the subsidy ends remains to be seen in the data.
On Sept. 30, Robinhood’s annual HOOD Summit is scheduled to unveil new products for active traders. On the Pons side, the market is also waiting for the next version of the platform. The report says the market expects the update to adjust the issuance mechanism, fees and graduation rules on top of V2.
Robinhood Chain was originally pitched as a way to bring stocks onchain. Serial token launches and concentrated control at the opening are not new tactics in crypto. On this chain, the packaging changed to equities and real estate, but the underlying problems described in the report look familiar.