united-states
This answer is provided based upon U.S. law rather than the law of Argentina, with which I am not familiar.
However, the basic concepts are pretty similar everywhere, so there is a good chance that even if this conduct is illegal in some country, it is illegal as a result of a country-specific law banning the practice of "sniping" and not under general laws prohibiting insider trading, which "sniping" does not appear to be.
I am not familiar with the term "sniping" but I will take the question at its word when it defines "sniping" as follows:
this involves having prior knowledge about an instrument coming onto
the market and its political links, and putting in place mechanisms to
make purchases and then sales in a short time frame after the details
of the instrument are publicly released.
Knowing the time that a new offering of a security, including but not limited to a coin offering, will be made, and acting on that knowledge, does not constitute insider trading.
Insider trading involves trading on non-public information obtained from an insider that is pertinent to the true value of the security.
For example, if you knew that a new coin offering was a stablecoin linked to the Swiss franc, and you had insider information that Switzerland was going to deflate its currency by 50% in 48 hours without giving anyone public notice of this move, that might be an insider trading violation.
(Sorry for the lame example. It was the best one I could come up with, given that the value of most cryptocurrencies aren't tied to any fundamentals, which makes an insider trading violation basically impossible.)
Both in ordinary securities, and in cryptocurrency coin offerings, findings ways to gain the opportunity to make a purchase in an initial public offering through non-public insider information is legal and is routinely done. Initial public offering access is often secretly provided to politicians, key business partners, celebrities, and the friends and family of insiders.
Sometimes this access comes from people who count as insiders, and sometimes it doesn't.
For example, in the old days (i.e., before the Internet was invented, which happened during my lifetime and long after my law professors acquired the war stories they told us in their lectures), when public offerings were made on professionally printed stationery, rather than with computers, one of the ways that outsiders used to identify the timing of a new offering in order to get in on it was to have a private investigator hang out in coffee shops frequented by workers at the printing companies that prepared this stationery, or by keeping an eye out for signs that the employees of the handful of companies that did this work were working overtime, e.g., through take out orders to their shop, or lights kept on in their work places late at night. Needless to say, in the modern world of electronic communications and non-disclosure agreements everywhere you look, this particular trick doesn't work any more.
But it doesn't matter.
Basically, this kind of petty corruption is tolerated in private business transactions, because while it disadvantages other investors who don't have this information, it isn't defrauding a secondary market seller or buyer on the other side of that transaction.
It isn't analogous to someone selling a car that is known to be lemon to a purchaser of a car, without disclosing that fact, which is basically the kind of harm that insider trading laws are seeking to address.
It is more analogous to playing favorites over who will receive the opportunity to be a contestant in a lucrative game show, which is not illegal for a private game show operator to do.
This answer is premised on the former SEC position that crypto coins are securities.
In February 2025, the Trump administration reversed that position over a dissent from a legacy SEC commissioner. Under the current administration position, it is not insider trading, because insider trading involves securities, and a crypto coin is not a security, and hence, beyond the scope of insider trading laws and regulations.
But, since the Chevron doctrine (requiring courts to defer to agency interpretations of statutes that they are charged with enforcing) no longer applies (because the U.S. Supreme Court overruled this long-standing precedent), this interpretation has less weight than it did historically in private securities litigation.
Also, there is reason to doubt that the change in position was made in conformity with the Administrative Procedures Act, which would normally require public notice and comment process which was not undertaken to change an agency position of this kind.
However, since it wouldn't be insider trading whether or not it was a security, this doesn't change the answer to the question.
