Author: Nicky, Foresight News
On July 15th, the Robinhood Chain token launch platform vlad.fun experienced malicious actions by internal developers on its launch day. According to official sources, two external developers involved in building the platform secretly created their own token and hardcoded it into the frontend code, causing only that token to be visible to users upon platform launch, while all other creators' tokens were completely hidden. The team discovered the anomaly within two hours, promptly dismissed the involved developers, and removed the malicious code.
The official statement emphasized that the team never approved issuing a vlad.fun platform token, and the two individuals unilaterally decided to launch one for "page views." After negotiation, the duo returned approximately $15,000 in creator fees and test token proceeds. The recovered funds, totaling about 7.8 ETH, have been deposited into the team's secure wallet. Additionally, approximately 4.16 ETH in protocol fees generated from the platform launch are held in the team's multi-signature address.
Public information shows that vlad.fun was rapidly built by a small team of 5 within 48 hours. Currently, two project-affiliated members have issued statements, but the specific identities of the two external developers have not been disclosed as of publishing. According to the incident explanation thread posted by the project's official account on July 18th, the two external developers were responsible for providing the core codebase for the launchpad. In the final code commit before the platform went live, they manually added a line of hardcoded logic to the frontend, forcing their own token to be displayed on the homepage, while other creators' tokens were completely obscured due to loading issues.
After the launch, users quickly noticed the anomaly, with the entire platform displaying only one token. Team members began reviewing the code and found the manually added hardcoded line in the commit history. When questioned by the team, the two developers initially blamed technical issues such as RPC failures, environment variable problems, and caching, but the persistent visibility of the relevant token contradicted such explanations.
According to the official account, one of the developers later requested the disabling of the branch protection feature on the code repository, claiming a need to "rollback some content." Before removing the protection, the team performed a timestamp backup of the entire repository and observed the two deleting the line containing the hardcoded logic. The official statement noted that this attempt to destroy evidence ultimately revealed their intent. Confronted with the evidence, the two developers admitted to their actions.
This incident highlights the trust risks faced by rapidly built crypto projects when involving external developers. The identities of the two involved developers have not been publicly disclosed, with the team stating they have taken advice to withhold their identities for now. vlad.fun stated that in the future, external personnel will no longer be allowed access to sensitive systems, and the team prefers developing based on open-source contracts.
The official website shows that vlad.fun is currently in a suspended operational state. The team stated they will prioritize handling matters for affected users.
Community member Will Mexi publicly clarified his role after the incident. He stated he was responsible for project application listings, frontend optimization, design, branding, and animations, and was not one of the two developers involved, nor did he participate in planning or executing the operation. According to his account, he tested a normal version of the website about 20 minutes before launch, so he did not notice the anomaly.
Will Mexi said that after the platform officially launched, he saw the token appearing illogically, immediately read the newly committed code, discovered the hardcoded line, and promptly reported it to the core team. He also mentioned that enabling branch protection earlier was due to caution regarding external code, and this setting ultimately preserved the complete commit history and evidence of intent. He simultaneously denied purchasing any platform tokens and claimed to have incurred losses due to expensive RPC, API, and server deployment costs.
Core team member @SOLsesame also expressed support in the incident thread. He belongs to the core small team that has collaborated with Will Mexi and others for over a year and is not one of the involved external developers. His background shows he is an active builder in the Solana ecosystem, having been deeply involved in the ai16z ecosystem and its PartnersNFT and PartnersDAO projects. Recently, he collaborated with Will Mexi to build and launch the Black Bull NFT series from scratch for the ANSEM community within 24 hours.
As a token launchpad on Robinhood Chain, vlad.fun differs from traditional bonding curve launchpads. Its design goal is to complete token deployment and direct launch to Uniswap V3 or V4 in a single transaction, making tokens instantly tradable on decentralized exchanges without going through a "graduation" migration step. Liquidity pool positions are permanently locked via a locker contract and cannot be withdrawn by the team, reducing the risk of rug pulls at the mechanism level.
In terms of fairness design, the platform employs mechanisms such as a fixed supply, no presale, and no large team allocations. It also offers an optional developer priority buy feature, allowing developers to buy at launch with zero transaction fees. An anti-whale mechanism limits single wallet holdings to 2%, preventing concentrated holdings by a single address. For fee routing, the platform supports setting a 1% to 5% transaction fee, which can be instantly directed to specified recipients, including wallet addresses, social accounts, or buyback/burn proxies. Fees are locked at launch and cannot be changed. Additionally, the platform plans optional models such as staking for rewards.
Despite vlad.fun hitting pause due to the internal incident, the launchpad ecosystem on Robinhood Chain has not cooled down. According to DefiLlama data, the chain's current TVL is approximately $258 million, with 24-hour fees around $118,000 and revenue about $106,000. Uniswap's 24-hour fee expenditure on the chain reached $1.95 million. The ecosystem has already gathered multiple launchpads, each forming a differentiated competitive landscape: the latecomer PONS holds the leading launchpad position with intensive development and continuous updates. Its platform token has a market cap of about $12 million, with a gain of over 4200% in the past 7 days. Furthermore, the Butterfly platform focuses on stock-like meme tokens but has yet to produce a hit. Native Uniswap innovative mechanism tokens, such as RWA dividend-sharing tokens like index, which received official attention, once surged to a market cap of $30 million on July 17th.
