Robinhood Chain's token launchpad vladfun was "stabbed in the back" by internal developers upon launch, with their self-created token hardcoded for priority display.
Author: Nicky, Foresight News
On July 15, Robinhood Chain's token launchpad vladfun experienced a malicious operation incident 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, resulting in users only seeing this token when the platform launched, while all other creators' tokens were invisible. The team detected the anomaly within two hours, immediately fired the involved developers, and removed the malicious code.
The official statement emphasized that the team never agreed to issue a vladfun platform token; the two individuals decided on their own to launch it for "views". After negotiations, they returned approximately $15,000 in creator fees and test token proceeds, with a total of about 7.8 ETH recovered, which has been deposited into the team's secure wallet. Additionally, approximately 4.16 ETH in protocol fees generated from the platform's launch are stored in the team's multi-sig address.
Public information shows that vladfun was quickly built by a small team of 5 people within 48 hours. Currently, two project-related members have issued statements, and as of press time, the specific information of the two external developers has not been disclosed. According to the incident explanation thread released by the project's official account on July 18, the two external developers were responsible for providing the core codebase of the launchpad. In the final code submission before the platform's launch, they manually added a line of hardcode to the frontend, forcing their own token to be displayed on the homepage, while other creators' tokens were completely obscured due to loading issues.
Users quickly noticed the anomaly after launch—only one token was displayed on the entire platform. Team members began reviewing the code and found the manually added hardcode line in the submission records. When questioned by the team, the two developers initially evaded with technical reasons such as RPC failures, environment variable issues, and cache problems, but the fact that the relevant token remained visible clearly contradicted these explanations.
According to the official introduction, one of the developers then requested to disable the branch protection feature of the code repository, claiming the need to "roll back certain content". Before lifting the protection, the team made a timestamped backup of the entire repository and observed that the two individuals deleted the line containing the hardcode. The official statement pointed out that this attempt to destroy evidence ultimately exposed their intentions. Faced with evidence, the two developers admitted what they had done.
This incident reflects the trust risks faced by fast-built crypto projects when introducing external developers. The identities of the two involved developers have not been made public yet, and the team stated that they have taken advice to refrain from disclosing them for now. vladfun said that in the future, it will no longer allow external personnel to access sensitive systems and will prefer to develop based on open-source contracts.
According to the official website, vladfun is currently in a suspended operation state, and the team stated that it will prioritize handling matters for affected users.
Community member Will Mexi publicly clarified his role after the incident. He claimed to be responsible for project application lists, frontend optimization, design, branding, and animations, not one of the two involved developers, nor did he participate in planning or executing the operation. According to his description, he tested the normal version of the website about 20 minutes before launch, so he did not detect the anomaly.
Will Mexi said that after the platform officially launched, he saw the token appear and found it illogical, then read the newly submitted code and discovered the hardcode line, immediately reporting it to the core team. He also said that the branch protection was开启 earlier out of caution for external code, and this setting ultimately preserved complete submission records and evidence of intent. He also denied purchasing any platform tokens and said he suffered losses due to paying expensive RPC, API, and server deployment fees.
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, not the involved external developers. His past experience shows that he is an active builder in the Solana ecosystem, having deeply participated in the ai16z ecosystem and its PartnersNFT and PartnersDAO projects, and recently 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, vladfun differs from traditional bonding curve launchpads. Its design goal is to complete token deployment and directly launch to Uniswap V3 or V4 in one transaction, with tokens immediately tradable on decentralized exchanges without going through a "graduation" migration step. The liquidity pool position is permanently locked via a locker contract and cannot be withdrawn by the team, reducing the risk of rug pulls mechanism-wise.
In terms of fairness design, the platform adopts a fixed supply, no presale, no large team allocation mechanism, while providing an optional developer priority purchase feature that allows developers to buy at zero transaction fees during launch. The anti-whale mechanism controls the single wallet holding limit at 2% to prevent concentration of holdings in a single address. For fee routing, the platform supports setting transaction fees of 1% to 5%, which can be instantly directed to designated recipients, including wallet addresses, social accounts, or buyback and burn agents. Fees are locked and cannot be changed at launch. Additionally, the platform plans optional models such as staking dividends.
Although vladfun has pressed the pause button due to internal incidents, the launchpad ecosystem of Robinhood Chain has not cooled down. According to DefiLlama data, the chain currently has a TVL of approximately $258 million, 24-hour fees of about $118,000, and revenue of about $106,000, with Uniswap's 24-hour fee expenditure reaching $1.95 million. Currently, multiple launchpads have gathered in the ecosystem, forming a differentiated competition pattern: the rising star PONS occupies the leading position in launchpads with intensive development and continuous updates, with its platform token having a market cap of approximately $12 million and a 7-day gain of over 4200%. In addition, the Butterfly platform focuses on crypto-stock Memes but has not yet formed a hit, while Uniswap-native innovative mechanism tokens such as RWA dividend tokens index once surged to a $30 million market cap on July 17 due to official attention.