Author: Nicky, Foresight News
The hype around Robinhood Chain has lasted over a week. However, behind the surge of new Meme coins, 'dark hunters' on the chain are also targeting this wave of popularity.
In the early hours of July 13th, the X platform accounts of SpaceXAI and Starlink, two products from the recently listed SpaceX, were compromised. They once forwarded a post promoting the Robinhood Chain network Meme token SCATMAN. The original account promoting this Meme, Sam Catman, even carried the affiliated gold checkmark verification for SpaceXAI.
After the repost, the token's market capitalization was quickly pushed to around $2 million. At this point, the deployer immediately withdrew the liquidity pool, causing the Meme's price to plummet almost to zero. Currently, the related post has been deleted, and the original account Sam Catman that posted the Meme token has been suspended on X. As of now, SpaceXAI, Starlink, and X have not publicly responded to this incident.
It is worth noting that SCATMAN was not created through any token launch platform on Robinhood Chain. The contract was deployed by the developers themselves with initial liquidity injected, belonging to a typical self-deployed token scam. The attacker used the compromised accounts to attract traders and immediately executed a liquidity withdrawal.
According to on-chain monitoring platform Lookonchain's tracking, the hacker minted 10 trillion SCATMAN tokens after compromising the account and completed the sell-off through two associated wallets. One wallet exchanged the tokens for 59 ETH, worth approximately $108,000; the other wallet sold part of the tokens for 14.7 ETH, worth about $27,000.
It is reported that the origin of the SCATMAN token name is not without reason. The recent public feud between X platform owner Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman provided a high-traffic backdrop for the account compromise.
After Apple filed a trade secret theft lawsuit against OpenAI on July 10th, Musk continuously criticized Altman as a 'liar' on X, while Altman retaliated by mocking Musk for promoting space data centers. The massive number of controversial posts generated extremely high attention, making Musk-related accounts like SpaceXAI and Starlink high-value targets for attacks.
The attacker leveraged this wave of public opinion heat to compromise the accounts and used them to promote the SCATMAN token.
The incident of a SpaceX-owned platform being compromised to promote a Meme is not an isolated case; even Robinhood's founder fell victim.
Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev accidentally leaked 8 wallet seed phrase words during a livestream, and the remaining 4 words were reportedly guessed at random by a hacker. On July 12th, after gaining control of the address, the hacker used it to buy the Robinhood chain Meme token $1, triggering a wave of followers from many investors.
Since the transaction records showed the 'founder's address' buying, it prompted thousands of investors to follow suit. The token's market capitalization rapidly surged from around $500,000 to $14 million in a short time, with trading volume reaching approximately $20 million within two hours, before the price sharply corrected to around the $1 million market cap level.
Subsequently, Robinhood Chain's RPC node froze the involved address. Any transactions sent from this address could not be packaged by the node, preventing funds from being transferred or traded further. This handling method also sparked controversy. Some community members argued that Robinhood Chain, positioned as an Arbitrum-based Ethereum Layer 2 network, freezing addresses at the node level deviated from the decentralized nature of blockchain networks.
These two consecutive incidents, both in method, point to exploiting high-profile accounts or individuals to create short-term hype for on-chain tokens, then cashing out after retail investors enter the market.
Starting from July 8th, the Robinhood Chain Meme token CASHCAT began its rally, with intraday gains once exceeding 1000%, reaching a peak market cap of $220 million on July 11th. According to DefiLlama data, the chain's current Total Value Locked (TVL) is approximately $151 million, with a 24-hour decentralized exchange trading volume of $875 million and fee revenue of about $100,000.
On July 8th, Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev posted on X that Robinhood is building the Robinhood Chain focused on real-world assets (RWA), but the network is also 'great for meme coins.' This statement further fueled speculative enthusiasm.
Although Robinhood Chain positions itself with RWA as its long-term focus, currently its main traffic still comes from Meme token trading. Against this backdrop, the chain quickly became an ideal 'soil' for fraudsters to operate.
From the compromise of the official SpaceXAI account to the exploitation of the leaked founder's wallet, two major incidents within two days reflect how the popularity of Robinhood Chain is attracting a large number of fraudsters. They leverage celebrity influence, the halo of official accounts, and investors' tendency to chase trends to quickly generate short-term hype, then cash out rapidly after retail investors enter. This also highlights the shortcomings in Robinhood Chain's early-stage rapid development, particularly in terms of ecosystem infrastructure and user protection mechanisms.
Simultaneously, the X platform, as a crucial medium for information dissemination, showed明显不足 (obvious inadequacies - note: original Chinese phrase retained but translation contextually implied) in security protection capabilities for high-value accounts. This allowed the two official accounts of SpaceXAI and Starlink, with millions of followers, to become channels for distributing scam information, directly converting the platform's immense traffic and user trust into amplifiers for fraud. The platform also did not issue any official response after this incident.
For ordinary investors, before chasing trends, verifying token contract addresses, confirming liquidity pool lock status, and maintaining vigilance towards narratives of 'official endorsement' remain the most basic lines of defense to avoid becoming exit liquidity.
