Traders claim $6 million profit by spotting BitGo's public pull request and frontrunning memecoin listing

A pseudonymous trader said their group profited more than $6 million by buying two Robinhood Chain memecoins ahead of their Robinhood listings after spotting a public BitGo code change and analyzing Wintermute's onchain activity. 

The trader, who posts on X as @3i, described their "edge" in an article published on Saturday that has drawn more than 300,000 views. The Block confirmed several of the public records the trader cites and found wallet activity that matches parts of the timeline, though could not verify the profit figures.

Robinhood launched Robinhood Chain, a Layer 2 network built on Arbitrum's tech stack, on July 1. BitGo announced wallet and custody support for the network the same day, while Robinhood has named algorithmic trading firm Wintermute as one of its largest crypto market makers in an SEC filing.

A clue in BitGo's public code repository

According to 3i, the pair began tracking Wintermute's wallets on Robinhood Chain and BitGo's activity on GitHub after it noticed that Wintermute had been moving tokens to Robinhood about an hour before earlier memecoin listings were announced. 

Indeed, a BitGo developer had opened a pull request, or a proposed code change, in the company's public BitGoJS repository on July 27. Included in the code: "Add hoodeth:cashcat (Cash Cat) token to hoodethTokens.ts on the Robinhood Chain." The change was merged the next day. 

While Cash Cat was launched on July 1, Robinhood didn't list the token until Aug. 6, ten days after the July 27 pull request was made. 

BitGo released a new version of its code on July 29, which included the Cash Cat code change alongside a separate change that added support for 99 Robinhood Chain stock tokens. "The implications of this were huge, as it confirmed my hunch that Robinhood was the one behind this request," 3i wrote. "Why else would cashcat be in there next to their native stock tokens?"

Wintermute provides final signal

Though 3i said the pair had been buying up the memecoin in the days after the pull request, eventually accumulating 1.5% of the token's overall supply, they had been waiting for a stronger signal to buy even more: Wintermute whitelisting the token, or transferring the token to Robinhood. 

The trader claims that on Aug. 3 at 1:48 p.m. ET, their monitoring bot caught Wintermute approving the trading pool. "That was the alert we’d been waiting for," 3i wrote. "The desk had selected a venue to trade the exact coin we were holding."

The pair began buying slowly to avoid drawing attention to their wallets, 3i wrote. But about half an hour later, at 2:19 p.m. ET, a wallet the pair suspected belonged to a Robinhood insider placed an $11,000 limit order for the memecoin. Knowing that other traders were watching the same wallet, the pair abandoned the slow approach and bought more than $1 million worth of Cash Cat at once, bringing their holdings to around 4% of the token's supply, according to 3i.

Per onchain data reviewed by The Block, a wallet made its first Cash Cat purchase at 1:54 p.m. ET on Aug. 3, six minutes after the Wintermute alert 3i describes. After three small buys, the wallet bought about 12 million tokens in two swaps at 2:20 p.m. ET, one minute after the suspected insider's order, before moving the tokens to other wallets. In total, it picked up about 15 million tokens, or 1.5% of the supply.

Onchain analytics firm Bubblemaps flagged the wallet the next morning, noting that it had spent $1.1 million on the memecoin as part of $2.7 million in purchases by a cluster of fresh wallets. While 3i's article claims ownership of the wallets in question, The Block could not independently confirm who controls them.

The Block also identified a Wintermute-labeled contract on Robinhood Chain that keeps a public list of tokens it is approved to trade, which may be one of the three contracts 3i describes that carry that list. However, Cash Cat was not added to that list until around 6:31 a.m. ET on Aug. 5, nearly two days after the signal 3i claims to have caught, but still about 27 hours ahead of Robinhood's listing announcement. 

Robinhood announced that Cash Cat was available to trade at 9:31 a.m. ET on Aug. 6, three days after the pair's largest purchase. 3i wrote that while they napped through the token's initial price spike following the listing, the pair still made more than $4 million between them by selling into the frenzy. 

Suspected insiders and a 'honeypot'

3i also claims the pair managed to get ahead of Robinhood employees who were themselves trading the listing. Another pseudonymous trader, clickless, published a separate account on the day of the listing describing a wallet they believed belonged to an insider, which placed a Cash Cat limit order before the announcement and ultimately lost money.

3i said the pair later repeated the trade with PONS, the token of a memecoin launchpad on Robinhood Chain. The trader said they began buying on Aug. 28 and that they and "friends" made $2 million, though the article does not explain how they identified the token.

What looked like a Sept. 2 listing of PONS, however, appeared to have been "some kind of honeypot for Robinhood to catch the insiders," 3i wrote. The trader added that most of the advantage described in the article has since faded.

On Sept. 15, the Department of Justice charged two former Robinhood engineers with commodities fraud and wire fraud for allegedly trading perpetual futures on Hyperliquid ahead of Robinhood listing announcements. Robinhood said at the time that it had investigated the matter and reported it to law enforcement.

The Block has reached out to Robinhood, Wintermute, BitGo and @3i for comment.