Robinhood founder's mnemonic phrase leak causes stir; SpaceXAI official account hacked to promote scam.
Written by: Nicky, Foresight News
Robinhood Chain's popularity has lasted for over a week, but behind the surging Meme fever, the "dark hunters" on the chain have also set their sights on this wave of hype.
In the early hours of July 13, the X platform accounts of SpaceXAI and Starlink (two major products under SpaceX, which had just completed its listing) were hacked, and at one point reposted content promoting the Robinhood Chain Meme token SCATMAN. The original account Sam Catman that promoted the Meme even had a subsidiary gold checkmark certification from SpaceXAI.
After the repost, the token's market cap was quickly pushed up to around $2 million, at which point the deployer immediately withdrew from the liquidity pool, causing the Meme's price to nearly drop to zero. Currently, the relevant posts have been deleted, and the X platform account of Sam Catman (the original account that posted the Meme token) has been banned. As of now, SpaceXAI, Starlink, and X officials have not publicly responded to this incident.
Notably, SCATMAN was not created through any token launch platform on Robinhood Chain. The contract was deployed by the developer themselves and injected with initial liquidity, making it a typical self-deployed token scam. After attracting traders using the hacked account, the attackers immediately executed the liquidity withdrawal operation.
According to chain monitoring platform Lookonchain, after hacking the account, the hackers minted 10 trillion SCATMAN tokens and sold them through two associated wallets. One wallet exchanged the tokens for 59 ETH, worth approximately $108,000; the other wallet sold part of the tokens to get 14.7 ETH, equivalent to about $27,000.
It is reported that the name SCATMAN is not without reason. X platform owner Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently had another public argument, providing a high-traffic background for the hacking of related accounts.
After Apple filed a trade secret theft lawsuit against OpenAI on July 10, Musk repeatedly attacked Altman as a "liar" on X, while Altman retorted by mocking Musk for selling space data centers. A large number of controversial posts brought extremely high attention, making Musk-related accounts such as SpaceXAI and Starlink high-value targets for attacks.
The attackers took advantage of this public opinion heat to hack the accounts and promote the SCATMAN token.
The incident of SpaceX's platforms being hacked and posting Memes is not an isolated case; even the Robinhood founder fell victim.
Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev accidentally leaked 8 wallet mnemonic phrases during a live broadcast, and another 4 were obtained by a hacker through random collision. On July 12, after gaining control of the address, the hacker used it to buy the Robinhood Chain Meme token $1, triggering many investors to follow suit.
Since the transaction record showed that the "founder's address" was buying, thousands of investors followed suit. The token's market cap quickly rose from about $500,000 to $14 million in a short time, with trading volume reaching about $20 million in two hours, then the price dropped sharply to around $1 million market cap.
Robinhood Chain's RPC nodes then froze the involved address; any transactions sent from this address could not be packaged by the nodes, so funds could not be transferred or traded further. This handling method also caused controversy. Some community members believe that since Robinhood Chain is positioned as an Ethereum Layer 2 network based on Arbitrum, freezing addresses at the node level deviates from the original intention of blockchain network decentralization.
The two consecutive incidents both use high-profile accounts or figures to create short-term hype for on-chain tokens, then cash out after retail investors enter.
Since July 8, the Meme token CASHCAT on Robinhood Chain has started a rising trend, with an intraday increase of over 1000% at one point, and its market cap reached a high of $220 million on July 11. According to DefiLlama data, the chain's current total locked value is about $151 million, 24-hour DEX trading volume is $875 million, and fee revenue is about $100,000.
Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev posted on X on July 8 that Robinhood is building Robinhood Chain for Real-World Assets (RWA), but the network is also "perfect for Meme coins." This statement further ignited speculative enthusiasm.
Although Robinhood Chain is positioned for RWA in the long term, the main traffic of Robinhood Chain currently still comes from Meme token transactions. Against this background, the chain was quickly regarded by scammers as an ideal "soil" for wrongdoing.
From the hacking of the SpaceXAI official account to the exploitation of the founder's wallet leak, the two major incidents in two days reflect that Robinhood Chain's popularity is attracting a large number of scammers. They use celebrity effects, the aura of official accounts, and investors' psychology of chasing hotspots to quickly create short-term hype and cash out quickly after retail investors enter. It also reflects the deficiencies in Robinhood Chain's ecological infrastructure and user protection mechanisms during its early rapid development.
At the same time, as an important medium for information dissemination, X platform's security protection capabilities for high-value accounts are obviously insufficient, making the two official accounts of SpaceXAI and Starlink (with millions of followers) become channels for distributing scam information, directly converting the platform's huge traffic and user trust into an amplifier for scams. No official response has been made after this incident.
For ordinary investors, verifying the token contract address, confirming the liquidity pool lock status before chasing hotspots, and remaining vigilant about the "official endorsement" narrative are still the most basic defenses to avoid becoming exit liquidity.