3 in 4 Solana memecoin buyers lose money, $269 million in 10 launch weeks
Pump.fun and the other Solana launchpads put out thousands of new coins every day, and each one draws a rush of buyers hoping to catch the next big one. We checked how those buyers actually did.
- 74%
- $269 million
- 2.9x
- 56%
- 34%
01 · One buyerUp $4, then down $13
On 10 June, a Solana wallet bought a new memecoin called TrumpButt for about $41 in SOL. Half an hour later it sold the lot and was about $4 ahead.
An hour after that, the same wallet aped back into TrumpButt with about $18. This time the price went the other way. Seven minutes later it sold for about $1. After four trades and their fees, the wallet was down about $13.
That wallet is close to the typical buyer we found. We followed every ordinary buyer of new Solana memecoins in one launch week a month for 10 months. About three in four ended with less SOL than they started with, and the middle buyer lost $13. The top 10% of buyers took 95% of what was won, and the bots that trade around new coins came out ahead.
02 · The coinsWhat is a Solana memecoin launch?
A memecoin is a token with no business behind it, only a name, a picture and a crowd. On Solana anyone can make one in a minute on a launchpad such as Pump.fun. The new coin starts on a bonding curve, a price formula that rises as people buy. If enough SOL comes in, the coin graduates to a normal trading pool, on Pump.fun's own exchange PumpSwap or on another exchange. Most coins never get that far: only 1 in 58 Pump.fun coins graduates, and most stop trading after their first day.
Buyers are not alone at a launch. Sniper bots buy in the first second. The coin's creator, the dev, often buys in the same moment from a bundle of their own wallets. Sandwich bots trade just before and just after a buyer to take a slice of each trade. We have written about snipers and bundles and sandwich attacks before. Here we ask a simpler question. Does the ordinary buyer make money?
We counted a wallet as an ordinary buyer if it paid the network fee on its own trades and made fewer than 100 swaps on its busiest day. It also had to put at least 0.1 SOL into new coins, about $7 to $14 over the period, and keep its coins in the same wallet. We left out each coin's dev and wallets on our lists of known bots. One person can own more than one wallet, so the counts are of wallets. Our count of real people trading on Solana uses similar tests.
03 · The countDo memecoin traders make money?
In every launch week we checked, most buyers lost. The share ran from about seven in ten to about eight in ten, and across all of them it was about three in four.
Losing did not depend on a bad month. It held in a winter when SOL traded near $140 and in a summer when it was below $80. Bags that buyers never sold count as worth nothing, but that changes little, because these buyers sold almost everything they bought within two weeks.
04 · Other countsWhy does CoinGecko say most Pump.fun traders profit?
Other counts look kinder to traders. A study by the crypto data site CoinGecko, updated in May 2026, reported that 73% of Pump.fun traders were in profit in April 2026. It nets each wallet's sales against its purchases across all coins in a month, leaves out coins that were never sold, and does not filter out bots.
We ran that method on our own April data, counting every wallet that traded on Pump.fun or PumpSwap. Only 27% came out ahead, close to the 28% of ordinary buyers who were ahead by our own count. We could not reproduce CoinGecko's figure. Its study prices trades in dollars, and it notes that those prices can be wrong for thinly traded tokens.
05 · The lossesHow much do memecoin buyers lose?
Most losses were small. The median buyer lost $13, and the typical loss was much the same in every launch week. A small group of big losers carried much of the money. Buyers who lost $1,000 or more account for 46% of everything lost.
Big wins were rarer than big losses. For every buyer who won 10 SOL or more, about three lost that much.
06 · The winnersWho makes money on memecoins?
The money that was won went to a few. The best 1% of ordinary buyers took 56% of all the gains, and the next 9% took most of the rest. The other nine in ten buyers shared what was left, and most of them lost.
Sandwich bots were the steadiest winners. They trade just before and after a buyer to take a slice, and they made about $13 million on the same coins in the same weeks. They were ahead in all 10 launch weeks. Devs who buy their own coin at launch from a bundle of wallets, and sniper bots that buy in the first second, sell into the crowd that comes after them. On coins launched from late October 2025 to June 2026, devs' bundles made at least $579 million and snipers $31.5 million.
07 · TimingDoes buying a memecoin early help?
Buying early helped, but only a little. Coins bought in the first minute after launch were sold at a profit 34% of the time. Coins bought a day after launch were sold at a profit 28% of the time.
Even the fastest ordinary buyers lost on two coins in three. In the first minute they share the market with the sniper bots, which buy in the same second and are built to sell first.
08 · StrategyDoes buying more coins help?
Spreading money across more coins did not help. Buyers of a single coin lost 71% of the time, and buyers of many coins lost more often. Bigger stakes did a little better, but most of those buyers still lost.
09 · MethodHow we did this
We used Bitquery's Solana trade data from November 2025 to August 2026 (the same history is sold as files on the Bitquery Data Store). For each month we took one launch week and the new coins that first traded on a launchpad that week: Pump.fun, Meteora's launch curve, Raydium LaunchLab and similar. We followed every wallet that bought one of those coins with SOL for the launch week and the seven days after it.
A wallet's result is the SOL it got from selling, minus the SOL it paid, minus the network fees on its own transactions. Pump.fun's trading fee is included. If a wallet sold more coins than it bought (because it received some from elsewhere), we counted only the part it bought. Coins not sold count as worth nothing. Priority tips and fees charged by trading terminals such as Axiom or Photon are not included, so the real losses are a little larger.
To find ordinary buyers we dropped each coin's dev and wallets on our lists of snipers, bundles, sandwich bots and other bots. We also dropped wallets with 100 or more swaps on any day, wallets that never paid their own network fee, and wallets that moved coins to another wallet. Some of the last group are wallet farms that sweep coins out of several wallets in one transaction. We measured them on a random sample of 1 wallet in 20 and scaled the counts up; on the full data the sample matched the full count to within half a point.
We checked the work four ways. Our fee rule matched 34 trades on chain, with Pump.fun sales within 0.8%. Five wallets rebuilt by hand from the raw trades matched exactly. The wallet in the opening matched a public Solana node. And a second set of queries, written separately from the same rules, put the share of losing buyers within 2 points of ours for three months.
10 · EvidenceTransactions and wallets cited
| What | Transaction or wallet |
|---|---|
| Wallet in the opening | GAfg…uKkg |
| First TrumpButt purchase, 10 June | 65fqot…fqSz |
| First sale, about 30 minutes later | 53F8AY…aeie |
| Second purchase | pSi8cT…vUPf |
| Second sale, seven minutes later | 5o4CZ5…izw2 |
FAQ
Do memecoin traders make money?
Most do not. About three in four ordinary wallets that bought new Solana memecoins ended with less SOL two weeks later, and most buyers lost in every launch week we checked. The median buyer lost $13.
What percentage of Pump.fun traders lose money?
About 74% of ordinary buyers in our data, and most of them in every launch week. Most of the coins came from Pump.fun.
How much do memecoin buyers lose?
Most lose a little; the median buyer lost $13. A few lose a lot. Together, ordinary buyers lost about $269 million in the launch weeks we followed.
Who makes money on memecoins?
A small group of buyers, and the bots that trade around them. The best 1% of ordinary buyers took 56% of all gains. Sandwich bots made about $13 million on the same coins.
Why do other studies say most Pump.fun traders make a profit?
CoinGecko reported that 73% of Pump.fun traders were in profit in April 2026, netting each wallet's sales against its purchases for the month. Run the same way on our April data, only 27% of wallets came out ahead. We could not reproduce its figure.
Does buying a memecoin early help?
A little. Coins bought in the first minute after launch were sold at a profit 34% of the time, against 28% for coins bought a day later. Sniper bots buy in the same first second.
Only trades paid in SOL are counted. Coins bought with USDC or USD1 are left out.
Each buyer is followed for the launch week and seven days after. A coin sold later counts as unsold, and unsold coins count as worth nothing.
Tips and trading-app fees are not counted, so losses are slightly larger than shown.
Wallets that moved coins to another wallet are left out, because we cannot see what the coins were worth after they moved. Some are wallet farms; some are people moving coins to a second wallet.
Launch weeks were picked to avoid days with known gaps in our data: some blocks missing in late November and early December 2025 and in April 2026, and some Pump.fun trades missing from 1 to 25 May 2026.
September 2026 is left out because our record of token transfers ends on 30 August 2026, which we need to find coins that moved between wallets.
Dollar figures use the median SOL price over each launch week and the week after it.
Ask Solana's memecoin data in plain English
Every trade in this story comes from Bitquery's Solana data. The Bitquery MCP server puts that data behind an AI assistant, so you can ask how a wallet did on a coin or who bought first, without writing the query yourself. The full history of Solana trades is also sold as files on the Bitquery Data Store.
This article is provided for informational and educational purposes only and reflects analysis of publicly available on-chain data as of the dates indicated. It does not constitute legal, financial, compliance, or investment advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token or asset.
The findings describe trades observed on Solana in 10 launch weeks between November 2025 and August 2026. Wallets are described by their behaviour on the chain. None of them is attributed to a named person or group.
Pump.fun, PumpSwap, Meteora and Raydium are named because their programs appear in the trades described. That says nothing about the conduct of those companies. TrumpButt is named only as the coin traded in the opening example.
Reported by Gaurav Agarwal for Bitquery Research, with AI tools; every figure was checked against the raw data.
Nothing herein should be relied upon as a definitive determination of fact. Readers should conduct their own independent verification before taking any action. The authors and publisher accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from reliance on this material. All trademarks and company names are the property of their respective owners.