As the practice of sniping gains notoriety among memecoin traders, various kinds of anti-sniping software have advertised safeguards as a way to attract buyers.
Last week, memecoin BadCoin (BADAI) advertised the anti-sniping capabilities of Gra.fun that would supposedly help set its launch apart.
Unfortunately, the nascent software categorized even regular traders as snipers and disallowed their selling privileges, leading to a nearly immediate crash from the lucky few who could eject themselves from the project.
Sniping is a Wall Street term for brokers who executed orders at advantageous prices before competitors. The term evoked the image of a concealed marksman executing targets with precision.
The meaning of the term morphed over time and high-frequency trading firms escalated the speed of sniping into a microsecond-scale competition that culminated in battles for colocation near exchange servers to exploit fiber-optic latency differentials.
BadCoin promised protection from memecoin snipers
Eventually, crypto borrowed and repurposed the term. In less sophisticated markets for memecoins, people still talk about sniping in timeframes of seconds or minutes. Specifically, they talk about snipers as the group of sophisticated, well-capitalized traders that scour social media and token launch platforms to discover celebrity token launches at their precise moment of creation.
Memecoin snipers, in this context, find the contract address and immediately buy as much of it as possible with the intention of selling it a few seconds or minutes later to less sophisticated buyers who hear about the launch as social media posts slowly disseminate the news.
Founder Mike Sarvodaya and his BadCoin community hoped to leave the front-running snipers of Solana memecoins behind. Not only was their launch on a distinct blockchain by Binance, it also left the scam-ridden Pump.fun behind.
Neither of those tactics improved the outcome.
The memecoin’s price on Gra.fun shows a quick spike to an all-time high within five minutes, and then a consistent decline. Then, when the token migrated from Gra.fun to the on-chain exchange Pancakeswap, its price similarly spiked to an all-time high within five minutes and has crashed ever since.
A dual listing on Gate.io similarly spiked to its all-time high around five minutes from inception and then crashed for hours.
BADAI spiked to an all-time high within five minutes and has been dropping ever since.
Read more: Pump.fun exploiter doxxed himself then took credit with bizarre tweets
BNB Chain itself broadcasted the token
Gra.fun operates on the Binance-founded blockchain, BNB Chain, and earned a dedicated tweet about its launch. BNB Chain acknowledged tweeting BADAI’s token generation event but denied having any commercial or investment relationships with the coin.
It implored Gra.fun and BadCoin to work on its shortcomings.
Gra.Fun acknowledged its own failures in an X post, admitting that an integration issue with its protection filters blocked legitimate sellers. Filters ran on two liquidity pools and somehow blacklisted one another. This led some users who interacted with the associated pools to become blacklisted.
For its part, Gra.fun said its team is manually investigating each address affected by this issue.
Protos has reached out to Bad AI for comment but did not receive an immediate reply. We will update this article if we receive further information.
