Pump.fun’s biggest winners may be impossible to copy as $752 million study exposes hidden trading gap
Bitquery examined 3,170 Pump.fun wallet-token positions reporting gains of at least $100,000 from October 2025 to August 2026. Only 26% of the $752.5 million in gains met its checks for conventional market trading. More than half involved tokens received by transfer, and 13% showed potentially coordinated trading. Some transferred tokens could be legitimate holdings moved between an investor’s wallets, but transfers—especially those traced to token creators—can inflate wallet-level profit figures without showing the original purchase cost. Copy-trading systems may therefore display gains that followers cannot reproduce because they lack a corresponding buy signal. Wash-loop patterns also appeared among many of the largest winners. Bitquery did not assess copy traders’ actual returns, so the gap between leaderboard profits and executable results remains unmeasured.
