Traders borrowed BitGo's public code changes to front-run Robinhood's coin listing, making a profit of 6 million USD
A trader using the pseudonym @3i stated that their team bought Cash Cat and PONS in advance before the launch of two Robinhood Chain Meme coins on Robinhood, collectively profiting over 6 million dollars. According to their description, the team has been tracking Wintermute's wallets on Robinhood Chain and BitGo's GitHub activity since July, having previously discovered that Wintermute transferred tokens to Robinhood about an hour before the announcement of the Meme coin launch. After the article was published on Saturday, it has garnered over 300,000 views. The Block verified several public records mentioned in the article and found wallet activity that matched some of the timelines, but could not verify the profit figures.On July 27, BitGo developers submitted code changes in the public BitGoJS repository to add Cash Cat to the Robinhood Chain token list, with the changes merged the following day; BitGo released a new version on July 29, adding support for 99 Robinhood Chain stock tokens. Cash Cat was issued on July 1, and Robinhood did not list the token until August 6. On August 3, their monitoring bot detected that Wintermute approved the relevant trading pool, and the wallet subsequently made small purchases, then bought over 1 million dollars in a single transaction after a suspected insider placed a limit order of 11,000 dollars, raising its holdings to about 4% of the supply. On-chain data shows that the wallet accumulated approximately 15 million tokens, accounting for 1.5% of the total, and was marked by Bubblemaps the following day. The team claimed to have sold during the post-launch rush, profiting over 4 million dollars.The trader stated that the team began buying the tokens from the Meme coin issuance platform on Robinhood Chain, PONS, on August 28, collectively profiting 2 million dollars with their friends, but the article did not specify how they identified the token. He believes that the PONS launch on September 2 appears to be a honeypot set up by Robinhood to catch insiders and noted that most of the information advantages described in the article have disappeared. On September 15, the U.S. Department of Justice charged two former Robinhood engineers with front-running the coin listing announcement trading perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid, suspected of commodity fraud and wire fraud.