Analyst Wazz Ties $18.4M Robinhood Chain Rug Pull Wave to One Operator on Ethereum (ETH) L2

53 Tokens, a Single Operator

At least 53 tokens issued on Robinhood Chain — the Ethereum layer-2 network launched by brokerage Robinhood — were very likely controlled by one operating group that extracted roughly $18.43 million from buyers between July 10 and September 21, according to an on-chain investigation published by analyst Wazz in a detailed thread on X. The affected tokens, the bulk of them memecoins, went live over a span of about two months, and the transaction pattern repeats with unusual discipline: moments after each issuance, a coordinated cluster of wallets acquired most of the supply, sold it into early retail demand, and converted the proceeds back into crypto — frequently recycling the recovered funds straight into the capital base of the next launch.

a detailed thread on Xhttps://x.com/WazzCrypto/status/2104194307628621976

The single-operator attribution rests on two independent threads in the on-chain records. Of the 53 projects, 45 are linked through a direct funding path: money cashed out of one token was routed to fresh addresses that then bankrolled the following issuance. The remaining 8 share reused signing keys or a common collection wallet. If that attribution holds, this was not 53 unrelated rug pulls but one operation running an industrialized issuance-and-exit loop. Robinhood Chain itself went live on July 1 as an Arbitrum-based Ethereum layer-2 designed around tokenized equities and real-world assets, and no evidence indicates Robinhood issued, promoted, or dumped any of the tokens in question — the activity sits with third parties on top of the network. The largest single-token recoveries identified so far are CRUMBS at about $3.12 million, LEGS at about $2.9 million, and PINK at about $1.44 million. Notably, names such as CRUMBS, PINK, and DEED were issued multiple times in close succession, a pattern consistent with fake twin tokens launched to capture hype before the purported genuine contract was revealed.

Inside the Pons V2 Exemption

Most of the flagged tokens came to market through Pons V2, a third-party, non-custodial launchpad — a decentralized application (dApp) where anyone can mint a token in seconds. Pons uses a bonding-curve model: new tokens sell along a pricing curve before liquidity migrates to Uniswap v4. To blunt sniping bots at open, early purchases carry a surcharge of up to 99% of the purchase amount — but issuers can exempt up to 32 wallets from that fee. On-chain data shows that in nine of the newer projects examined, creators pre-listed roughly 15 to 25 exempt wallets, which then bought in bulk through the same batch transaction one to three blocks after creation. The result: creator plus exempt addresses controlled 82% to 86% of supply at open, before ordinary buyers had any realistic entry. Across the wider sample, 70 to 200 wallets moved in sync to take more than 70% of each token.

The fund trail makes the recycling loop concrete. Addresses tied to the token DRAFT cashed out 179.88 ETH; part of that money reached an address that funded DEED's launch wallets about 40 minutes before DEED's official debut. In DEED, one address provisioned 92 wallets that sold roughly 130.75 ETH, while the creator drew a further 69.06 ETH from Pons's fee contract — about 199.8 ETH, or some $535,000, confirmed so far, with Wazz estimating the DEED total at 228.92 ETH. Some proceeds have already left the chain: on September 24 a linked address deposited about 86.5 ETH into the Relay bridge, which released roughly 86.3 ETH to an Ethereum mainnet address, where it was swapped into about 231,000 DAI that remains parked at a fresh address. The scale beneath it all is striking: Pons once booked about $5.95 million in daily fees in early September, saw roughly 25,000 new tokens on September 2 alone with about $544 million in volume, and has produced about 646,000 tokens from more than 167,000 creator addresses since July — a wave that pushed Robinhood Chain's weekly DEX volume to $12.4 billion at peak. Even now, the chain holds about $1.03 billion in DeFi TVL and $1.04 billion in stablecoins, with 24-hour DEX volume near $780 million and 7-day volume of $9.45 billion, down roughly 13%. The Pons token trades near $0.59, below its September high of about $0.97, on a roughly $400 million market cap. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

Fair-Launch Design Under Scrutiny

Our reading of the records is that this episode is less a hack than a design inversion: the anti-snipe tax meant to protect fair launches became a privilege once issuers could whitelist exempt addresses. Permissionless issuance has fueled comparable waves elsewhere — Bitcoin's Runes token standard among them — and layer-2 networks like Optimism face the same structural test as Robinhood Chain. The core lesson survives the debate over attribution: on a blockchain, 100 addresses are not 100 investors. The primary evidence here is the on-chain transaction record itself — the batch purchases, the fee-exemption lists, and the Relay bridge trail — all of it open for independent re-verification, and supply concentration remains the clearest risk signal while the operator stays unidentified.