The Solana AI token AVA faced a coordinated launch sniping event that concentrated supply among a small cluster of wallets, undermining market integrity and triggering a sharp collapse, according to Bubblemaps. On-chain evidence points to activity involving the deployer’s address and synchronized purchases at launch, highlighting recurring risks in token releases and exposing structural weaknesses in early-stage liquidity formation.
On-chain evidence of coordinated accumulation
On-chain forensic data indicate that 23 wallets — including the deployer’s address — received fresh funding and executed near-simultaneous buys at AVA’s public launch. Those wallets secured about 40% of the token’s supply before the broader market could access liquidity, and the token subsequently fell roughly 96% from its peak, a pattern consistent with concentrated pre-launch accumulation followed by rapid selling.
Remember $AVA?
40% bundled at launch, linked to the deployer
Your AI girlfriend took all your money 🧵 pic.twitter.com/31uMnlglfi
— Bubblemaps (@bubblemaps) December 18, 2025
The wallets exhibited coordinated behaviors: they had no prior transaction history, were funded within tight temporal windows from major exchanges, and placed highly similar buy orders at the same moments. This behavioral profile suggests centralized orchestration rather than organic retail participation and materially weakens any claim of fair initial distribution.
Investigators used historical flow reconstruction to cluster wallets and trace pre-launch funding sources. This technique recreates past token flows and wallet relationships, rather than mapping only present-day connections, enabling identification of synchronized, pre-launch acquisitions that would otherwise remain obscured.
“Sniping” refers to automated, front-running buys executed the moment a token becomes tradable, and MEV (maximal extractable value) is a primary driver behind such bots through transaction reordering or insertion on-chain. Solana and ecosystem projects are advancing defenses — from uniform-price auction models to AMM designs with sniper taxes and mechanisms resisting sandwich and front-running attacks — while simple mitigations like private RPC endpoints or generic taxes are widely viewed as insufficient on their own.
For traders and institutional treasuries, concentrated pre-launch accumulation creates acute liquidity and counterparty risk. Rapid dumps can wipe out exposure within minutes and obscure whether a project’s distribution was fair, forcing desks to treat early-stage tokens as structurally high-risk even before fundamental assessments are complete.
For token issuers and the Solana ecosystem, such events erode retail trust and raise the bar for compliance and due diligence. The observed funding links to large exchanges heighten questions about information asymmetry and underscore the need for transparent disclosure around pre-launch funding paths, wallet provenance and launch mechanics.
The AVA incident reinforces that fair token distribution requires both forensic monitoring and protocol-level launch design changes to limit extractive bot activity. Enhanced on-chain analytics and deliberate launch architectures are now operational necessities for risk managers and market participants evaluating early-stage Solana tokens.
