How Did Those Wallets Get In Before Me?

The public sale of one Robinhood Chain token lasted one second. The 32 wallets that bought it were named in the launch transaction, before anyone else could trade.

By JackedBasedDev. Measured October 9, 2026.

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You saw the token on the chart twenty seconds after it launched. You bought. When you looked at the holders, a group of wallets already owned most of the supply, and within a few minutes they were selling it to you.

The question every new trader asks is some version of "how did they get in before me?" The honest answer is that on most launches they did not race you. They were chosen. This piece walks through one launch on Robinhood Chain, block by block, and ends with two checks you can run in under a minute before you buy.

What "first" means on a chain like this

Robinhood Chain is an Arbitrum-style rollup. One operator, the sequencer, decides the order of transactions and produces a block roughly every tenth of a second. There is no public waiting room where you can watch pending trades and jump ahead of them, so "sniping" here is not the Ethereum picture of outbidding someone on gas. It is simpler: a program sees a token launch, sends its buy in the same instant, and the sequencer takes it before a human has opened the chart.

Launchpads know this. Pons V2, which most Robinhood Chain memecoins launch through, sells new tokens along a bonding curve, a contract that holds the supply and raises the price with every buy. To make being first worthless, the curve charges a snipe tax: 99 percent on any buy in the first seconds, falling to zero over a short window. For ZERO, the token below, the verified curve contract sets that tax at 99 percent for three seconds.

The same contract has a second feature. The creator can list wallets that skip the tax. The documentation, as quoted by The Block, describes it as a way for a team to place its opening buys across several wallets. The list is written into the launch transaction, so it is public from the first block. Whether it is used as intended, or used to hand the whole sale to a prepared set of wallets, is up to the creator. The point of this piece is that you can read the list yourself.

One launch, second by second

Token: zerotrace, ticker ZERO, contract 0x316fa3ab9a8fd8d7567a823dedecf28d9fee2894. Launched 2 October 2026 at 22:59:06 UTC. It reached a market cap above $2.5 million that night; 9,731 wallets have traded it and 2,132 hold it as of 9 October. A typical token, not a small one.

22:59:06, block 78,606,956. A wallet ending …27a0 calls the Pons V2 launch factory. The call creates the token, mints the full 1,000,000,000 supply into the curve, and passes a list called snipeTaxExemptions with 34 addresses on it. The curve logs 34 events, one per address, confirming each is exempt from the tax. Two of the 34 are the creator's own wallet and one other address that never bought. The other 32 are the wallets you are about to meet.

Blocks 78,606,957 to 78,606,963, the next 0.1 to 0.7 seconds. Thirty-five buy transactions land on the curve, one per wallet. Thirty-two of them come from wallets on the exemption list. Every one of those 32 buys records a tax of exactly zero, inside a window where anyone else would have paid 99 percent. Together they take 706.8 million tokens, 70.7 percent of the supply, for 4.10 ETH, about $10,900 at that day's price. The three buys from wallets not on the list get 7.5 million tokens between them.

Block 78,606,963, 0.7 seconds after launch. The curve has nothing left to sell. The launchpad does what it is built to do: it seeds the reserved 2/7 of supply into a Uniswap v4 pool and the token graduates. The first trade a member of the public could make happens in this block.

So at the moment you or anyone else could first buy ZERO, this is who held it.

Public buyers held zero percent. The 32 exempt wallets held 70.7 percent. The pool held the rest.

What the public did next, and what the 32 wallets did

The public arrived fast. In the first minute, 182 buys. In the first hour, 3,522 wallets bought about 472 ETH of ZERO, roughly $1.26 million. By the end of the first day, 7,421 wallets had put in about 1,045 ETH, $2.78 million. The chart did what charts do when that much money arrives: a $241,000 market cap at the open, $2.55 million at the peak about two and a half hours in.

The 32 wallets did not wait for the peak. The first sale came 28 seconds after launch. Then one roughly every six seconds, each wallet selling about 11 million tokens, 1.1 percent of the supply, straight into the pool. Sixty-seven direct sales between 28 seconds and 8 minutes 39 seconds after launch, and the entire 706.8 million tokens were gone, sold for about $145,000 at the prices in effect when each sale cleared. Against $10,900 paid, that is roughly thirteen times their money in under nine minutes, before the token had even made its high.

Notice the shape. There is no single red candle. Selling one wallet at a time, in one-percent slices, looks like ordinary profit-taking while a prepared group exits an entire allocation. The same wallets traded the token again afterwards; those trades are not counted here.

Who came out ahead

This launch was not a rug in the usual sense. The pool is still there, the token still trades, and people who bought in the first ten minutes mostly did fine, because the money kept coming for two more hours. The pattern shows up in who paid for that.

Of the 790 wallets that bought between one and ten minutes after launch, 76 percent have taken out more than they put in. Of the 2,457 that bought between ten minutes and an hour, 50 percent. Of the 3,594 that bought in the rest of the first day, 34 percent. After day one, 22 percent. The median first buy in the first ten seconds was $176; by the second day it was $24. The people with the least money, arriving last, funded the exits of everyone before them, and the 32 wallets at the front had paid almost nothing for the tokens they sold.

The two checks, under a minute each

You cannot see the exemption list on a chart, but it is on the explorer, and so is everything the first-minute wallets did.

Check 1: read the launch transaction. Open the token on the Robinhood Chain explorer (robinhoodchain.blockscout.com), go to the contract's creation transaction, and look at the decoded input. On a Pons V2 launch the function is launchToken and the last argument is snipeTaxExemptions.

• Fine: the list is empty, or it holds one to three wallets that still hold their tokens.
• Walk away, or treat it as a trade against a prepared group: the list holds ten or more wallets, and the token transfers page shows those same wallets buying in the first second. That is what ZERO's list looked like.

Check 2: look at the first-minute buyers. On the token's transfers page, sort oldest first and look at the first twenty or thirty buys.

• Fine: different sizes, wallets with a history, most of them still holding.
• Walk away: near-identical sizes (ZERO's exempt buys were 22 to 23 million tokens each), wallets with no history before that day, and sells from those same wallets starting within the first minute. On ZERO, 97 percent of the traced early buyers were wallets with three or fewer transactions in their life, and by seventeen minutes after launch all forty of the largest early buyers had already sold.

If you would rather not do this by hand, the early-buyer section of a Robinhood Chain scan on pumppill.org shows the same facts for any contract: who bought in the first blocks, what share of supply they took, whether they were fresh wallets, and whether they have sold. It read ZERO seventeen minutes after launch and flagged the first-block group and the fresh-wallet pattern. The launch-transaction check above is the sharper of the two, and it needs no tool at all.

An exemption list is a feature, and a team launching with its own wallets is a legitimate use of it. The list being public is what makes it safe. The failure is a buyer who never looks.

Methodology

• Launch and curve data come from the chain itself: the launch transaction 0xc6a77a2b…c151, the 34 SnipeTaxExempted events it emitted, and the 35 CurveBuy events on the curve contract in blocks 78,606,956 to 78,606,990, read through the public Robinhood Chain RPC. The tax parameters (9,900 basis points, 3 seconds, 1 percent fee, 2/7 of supply reserved) are read from the verified PonsV2BondingCurve contract at 0xe276…c897.
• Exits are the 67 token transfers from the 32 exempt wallets to the Uniswap v4 PoolManager in the 30 minutes after launch, valued at the median trade price of the minute each landed in. Seconds are derived from block numbers at the chain's observed rate of about 10 blocks per second over the first 24 minutes.
• Public trading comes from PumpPill's record of every Uniswap v4 and v3 swap on Robinhood Chain, read from the PoolManager and pool logs every 30 seconds and traced through routers and smart-wallet contracts to the wallet that placed the trade: 57,735 swaps for ZERO from launch through 8 October. Buys and sells paid in USDG are converted at $2,664 per ETH, the price on launch day.
• Cohorts group wallets by their first ZERO buy. "Came out ahead" means ETH received from sells exceeds ETH paid for buys. Wallets still holding count as not ahead; some of them will be, if they sell higher.
• Limits. Wallet counts are addresses, not people. The exempt wallets' later round trips in ZERO are excluded. Block-to-seconds is an estimate within a tenth of a second. Market caps use the full 1 billion supply.
• Wallets are shown truncated. Nothing here identifies a person; it describes transactions.

Sources

• The Block, Zack Abrams, 27 September 2026: "Onchain analyst links $18.4 million in Robinhood Chain memecoin extractions to single rug-pull operation." The Block matched 10 of the listed launches on-chain and quotes the Pons documentation on the snipe tax and the exemption list; the $18.43 million total is the analyst's figure, which The Block did not independently replicate.
• Robinhood Chain explorer: the launch transaction, the PonsV2LaunchFactory and PonsV2BondingCurve contracts (both verified), and the ZERO token page.
• PumpPill's fact pack for this article, with every number and the query that produced it.