Ten Pons V2 Launches Shared One Trick: Wallets Exempted From the Anti-Sniping Tax

Pons is the memecoin launchpad on Robinhood Chain, and its V2 contracts carry an anti-sniping tax: a penalty applied to buyers who pile in during the first moments after a pool opens, meant to stop bots from taking the supply before anyone else can bid. According to The Block, reporting the work of an onchain analyst, the creators of ten Pons V2 launches exempted a chosen set of wallets from that tax. Those wallets then bought most of each token's supply. The analyst links $18.4m in extracted value across the launches to what is described as a single operation.

The mechanism is worth understanding because it inverts the purpose of the tool. An anti-sniping tax works by making early buying expensive for everyone. If the deployer can whitelist addresses, the tax stops being a deterrent and becomes a filter: it clears the field of competing bots and ordinary buyers at exactly the moment the price is lowest, and leaves the exempted wallets buying alone. The protection is then doing the extracting.

What was actually observed

The evidence cited is onchain data: the exemption lists in the launch contracts, the buying by the exempted addresses, and the subsequent flow of value out of the ten tokens. That is the strongest class of evidence available on this beat, because the transactions are public and anyone can recount them. What onchain data does not do is name a person. The link between the ten launches is described as a single operation on the basis of shared behaviour and shared wallets, and no operator has been identified or charged.

The chain around it

This landed on a chain that is not short of activity. Robinhood Chain's total value locked reached $1.03bn on 27 September, an all-time high, and stood at $1.03bn today, up 3.4 percent over the week, according to DefiLlama. Decentralised exchange volume on the chain was $945.6m in the last 24 hours, with Uniswap V4 at $425.3m and Uniswap V3 at $365.4m. Against a day like that, $18.4m is small. Against the size of a typical Pons launch, it is not.

PONS, the launchpad's own token, was trading at $0.543 on Sunday morning, down 11.7 percent over 24 hours, on $911.1k of volume across a single pool, with a market cap of $371.0m and $3.9m of liquidity, according to DexScreener, read at 06:21 UTC on 28 September. This desk recorded the token at $0.591 and a $403.8m market cap a day earlier. The highest market cap in this desk's daily record is $461.6m, on 18 September. Nothing in the DexScreener data attributes the move to the report, and the token is a separate asset from the launches described.

Why launchpad settings matter more than launchpad branding

A launchpad is a set of default contract parameters plus a place to find new tokens. Buyers read the second and rarely read the first. The parameters that matter on any launch are the ones a deployer can change after deployment or set at deployment without disclosure: tax rates, tax exemptions, mint authority, and who can move liquidity. A fee that can be waived for named addresses is not a rule, it is a discretion, and discretion held by the deployer is the thing to check before the chart.

What to check on a Pons launch

Three things are visible without special tools on any launch of this type. Whether the contract holds an exemption or allowlist mapping at all. Whether any addresses are in it, and whether those addresses appear among the earliest buys. And whether a single cluster of wallets holds a large share of supply while the pool still looks new. None of that requires trusting a report, and all of it is checkable before a trade rather than after.

No enforcement action has been announced in connection with the launches, and Pons has not been reported as having confirmed or disputed the findings. The analyst's work stands as onchain evidence of a pattern across ten contracts.