In the fallout of the LIBRA meme coin scandal in which insiders received advanced knowledge of the launch mechanics, blockchain security firm CertiK revealed how a new breed of scammers is switching tactics to target automated trading bots instead.
Speaking with Decrypt at Consensus in Hong Kong last week, CertiK chief security officer Kang Li shared insights into how some smart contracts are being deliberately designed to target the snipers themselves.
"It turns out the target they are going after are the AI trading bots," Li said.
The insights are in response to how Hayden Davis, the self-styled "launch strategist" for LIBRA and other celebrity meme coins, described such projects as a "zero-sum game" in which only a few have control.
"Even at the top, all of it is extractive to some degree—none of it has value," Davis said in an interview with Stephen Findeisen (Coffeezilla) last week Sunday, describing how "professional snipers" are involved in meme coin launches, front-running a token and loading up to buy in before a launch is publicly announced.
Smart contract sniping is a method where bots monitor on-chain activity to detect newly launched tokens and execute trades before human traders can react.
These bots operate within on-chain infrastructure and are programmed to place trades as soon as liquidity becomes available.
Li explains that a new breed of sophisticated scammers is designing fake tokens with hidden "backdoors" that appear safe to AI-powered trading bots, which are programmed to detect security risks.
While these AI trading bots "are not dumb" and analyze tokens "to see if you have any clear rug-proofing function there," scammers have turned this into a bait-and-switch scheme, Li pointed out.
When a token is released, the scammers "immediately promote [this] in all the AI trading community," and "once they have a few buys, they rug pull it," Li said.
They just keep killing
Li challenges the idea that blockchain security isn’t necessary for meme coins and pump-and-dump schemes, arguing that the real risks lie in who controls the token, price manipulation, and the history of those behind it.
These scams are happening on a "massive scale," potentially causing losses in the "tens of millions of dollars," Li said. With little fear of legal consequences, scammers 'just keep killing' trading bots, exploiting the lack of a single big victim.
"Law enforcement and regulation, nobody cares about that," Li said.
While technical solutions exist, implementing them without introducing new security vulnerabilities is nearly impossible.
"There are some anti-sniping solutions, people can do that to block them in the smart contract layer," BitLayer founder Charlie Hu told Decrypt in a separate interview. "They detect abnormal gas fee payments and transactions, but many teams avoid these protections."
Such solutions set parameters to prevent sniping, but the way smart contracts are designed can create loopholes. In other words, if there are no strict controls over who can trade or how transactions are executed, sniping bots can still exploit the system.
"If developers make it pure permissionless, you just let the scammers go through," Hu said.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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