World's biggest crypto exchange Binance officially expanded its derivatives lineup today, launching perpetual contracts for two fundamentally different assets: the utility token PONS (Robinhood Chain) and the meme coin HAJIMI (BNB Smart Chain).
When setting the trading conditions, the exchange applied a differentiated approach to risk management: leverage of up to 20x is available for PONS, while leverage for the highly speculative HAJIMI is strictly capped at 3x.
Binance listing market reaction for HAJIMI and PONS tokens, Source: TradingView
The listings triggered an immediate influx of liquidity onto the exchange, reflected in a vertical surge in trading volumes on TradingView charts, and opened a window for a major on-chain attack.
The difference in available leverage stems from the projects' different natures and business models. PONS is the native utility token of Pons, the dominant launchpad on Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum-based L2 network.
Its deflationary model is built on automatic PONS buybacks and burns funded by fees. Following the news, the asset hit new highs around $0.93, with a daily trading volume of $20.39 million, while its market capitalization is already approaching $1 billion.
In contrast, HAJIMI is a pure meme coin on BNB Chain, launched through the four.meme platform. The asset is fueled exclusively by hype within the Asian community, while the conservative 3x leverage cap underscores its extreme volatility. HAJIMI is currently holding around $0.072, with a trading volume of $26.66 million.
How one bot hijacked the entire listing while everyone else was reading the push notification
Immediately after Binance published its announcement, a technological drama unfolded in the HAJIMI meme coin market. Automated algorithms captured the entire initial wave of liquidity ahead of retail traders.
According to on-chain analyst EmberCN, at exactly 13:55:12 UTC — the very second the news broke — a news trader carried out a successful MEV attack (front-running):
- Hidden costs: To secure the very top position in the block, the bot sent its transaction through a private RPC channel directly to the BNB48 Club validator node, paying a bribe of 35.3 BNB ($26,800) and another 5.5 BNB ($4,200) in priority gas fees.
- Trade and profit-taking: After spending $31,000 on fees, the bot was the first to buy 9.89 million HAJIMI for $200,000 at $0.02 per token and, a few minutes later, sold its entire position into the incoming wave of orders at an average price of $0.058, locking in $378,000 in net profit.
Trading in both pairs continues amid heightened volatility.