What the data says about launch sniping
Five research passes over Solana and EVM launchpads, Uniswap v4 hooks, proof-of-human providers, batch sales and known attacks. Every claim links to its source. Items marked unverified are kept out.
Eight findings that shaped the design
- Closest prior art is Uniswap's CCA plus Tally's identity-capped permitter. Uniform clearing price per block, identity-capped bids. The Aztec sale raised $61M from ~16.7k bidders with no sniping reported. Not on Robinhood Chain. Uniswap · ace-permitter
- Nobody ships proof-of-human, uniform batch and a permissionless memecoin-to-AMM handoff together. Nearest memecoin analogue: Orca Wavebreak (captcha, then a temporary on-chain trade permission with a per-tx cap). SolanaFloor
- Captchas don't work as the gate. Solvers cost $0.50–2.89 per 1,000; an ETH Zurich model solved 100% of reCAPTCHA v2; ChatGPT Agent solves Turnstile. Signal Census · ETH Zurich · SPLX
- KYC is not uniqueness. Pump.fun ICO: one actor, 500 KYC'd wallets. Jupiter WET: 1,100 of 1,530 wallets one sybil. Binance Alpha banned 600+ KYC'd bot accounts. Uniqueness needs a per-human nullifier. Blockworks · Cointelegraph · Bitcoin.com
- The bigger extractor is the deployer. Pump.fun dev bundles of at least $579M vs $31.5M for outside snipers across 8.2M launches. On Pons, 32 exempt whitelist slots led to $18.43M drained across 53 launches. Bitquery · Parameter
- Robinhood Chain orders first-come by arrival, ~100 ms blocks, no Timeboost. One low-latency provider reports winning 65–70% of same-nonce races. A batch window is the core, not an add-on. BlockRazor
- The market answer today is a decaying sniper tax: Pons 99% to 0 in ~5 s, Zora 10 s, Clanker up to 2 min, Jupiter Studio a random 15–60 s. Mobula · Zora · Clanker · Bitget
- The post-gate dump is the next problem. ~85% of snipers exit within 5 minutes; 98.6% of pump.fun tokens are pump-and-dumps by one estimate. Pine Analytics · Solidus
Threats the design has to answer
- Sybil permits from bought World IDs or KYC accounts: keep the per-human cap small enough that farming isn't profitable. The Block
- Insider permits and a signer issuing extras: no deployer exemptions, a public on-chain permit log, then no signer at all.
- Replay and transfer: permits bound to wallet, chain, hook and pool, single-use on-chain. NBA mint replay
- Signer outage: the gate fails open at its hard-coded end time.
- Biometric liability: never hold personal data; store only the nullifier. Kenya ruling