PANews used on-chain data to dissect the complete harvesting route and tried to reveal a cruel reality: when the issuance of MEME tokens becomes a mathematical probability game, and when the "community consensus" is mass-produced by industrial water armies, the ending of this carnival may have been predetermined.
For example, the address FrRqEYFfJ3VEHodfiZdrPnM3vAHTm2u9ewBN6HR9RxZE (hereinafter referred to as "FrRqE") issued 11 MEME tokens within 3 days, with a total profit of $25,000 and a 100% win rate.
Specifically, FrRqE will first make a large purchase of the token after the market opens, usually around 48 SOL, so that other users see that the token has been bought by a big player, and they will quickly follow suit, while FrRqE's holdings have already exceeded 70%. Then he will sell these tokens all at once within tens of seconds, with an average profit rate of 20%-30%, about $2,500 each time.
Of course, due to the now very sophisticated monitoring tools, when the developer's holding ratio is too high, many experienced old players will not buy in blindly. Therefore, FrRqE will quickly distribute these tokens to 400 wallet addresses after a single large purchase, in order to avoid on-chain robot monitoring. And when the amount in the Pump internal pool is about to be filled, FrRqE will repeat the trick, transferring all the tokens back to the same address and then dumping them all at once, instantly zeroing out the tokens.
Interestingly, the source of funds for this address seems to be deliberately hiding something. After more than a hundred on-chain tracing, PANews finally saw that the initial funds of this address came from the OKX exchange, with the initial receiving address being 3SrXcoKQ97xwFAwELnraHtpuycjGvmG82E9SBGs6UcQd.
From the operation time, this address has been carrying out such activities for more than 2 months. Each time after issuing about 10 tokens, the funds will be transferred to a new address to start the next round of RUG, and so far hundreds of RUG addresses have been derived.
Of course, in addition to these on-chain actions, the DEV who wants to complete the RUG also needs to do more, such as having dozens or even hundreds of replies for the tokens in the Pump internal pool, and in the early stage, the traces of a large number of robot purchases can be clearly seen. Both in terms of trading volume and discussion, it makes users feel that this project is a normal MEME token.
What's even more terrifying is that these tokens are not specially selected and discovered by PANews, but are accidentally found on the Pump.fun platform. For users who frequently participate in MEME investment, they should often encounter similar RUG traps.
The operation process of such RUG traps is not something that ordinary users can achieve.
- First, you need professional address distribution tools and aggregation addresses to complete flexible and unified token transfer operations.
- Second, you need real-time monitoring tools for social media hot spots to ensure that each token issuance is on the latest hot spot.
- Third, you also need a large number of Pump.fun water armies and social media water armies, such as the X account @r999d999z, which was created in January 2025 and has repeatedly promoted FrRqE's tokens, and the two seem to have a close relationship.
- Fourth, you need a dedicated trading robot to be responsible for hype and sending packaged transactions. To complete the above steps, you may really need a powerful technical team and operation team to achieve.
According to the data from dexscreener, in the past six months, among the tokens issued on Pump.fun, the number of tokens with a market value still above $50,000 is 1,987, of which only 27 tokens have survived for more than 1 month. Only 72 tokens have survived for more than 1 day, and the remaining 1,915 were issued within the last 24 hours. There were 6 tokens issued yesterday. Calculated based on this ratio, a total of 49,153 tokens were issued on Pump.fun on February 13, with a graduation rate of 1.23%, and 606 tokens graduated. And the proportion of graduated tokens that can still maintain a market value of over $50,000 within 1 day is only 0.9%. From the overall data, the probability of a token issued on Pump.fun being able to maintain a market value of $50,000 or more after 1 day is about one in ten thousand.
We take the 6 tokens that were still in existence after being issued on February 13 as a research sample, and see what characteristics these surviving tokens have (during the observation process, this data sample has decreased from 6 to 4).
By reviewing these four tokens, we can summarize several characteristics:
- First, the tokens behind these are all project tokens or have clear spokespersons. Among them, three are AI-related project parties, and 1 is a personal token issued by an internet celebrity. There is no trace of ordinary players randomly issuing tokens.
- Second, the LP lock-up ratio of these tokens is very high, basically above 95%, and the lock-up amount is all above $100,000.
- Third, the number of followers on social media is all above 2,000, and although the creation time of several accounts is not long, due to the interaction of KOLs, their social media scores are not low.
In summary, the era of PVP seems to be over, and it is almost impossible for individually issued tokens to break out or reach a high market value in this market. This is something that many players with issuance experience may have known long ago. Against this background, the DEVs who still choose to issue a large number of tokens every day obviously have their own unique business philosophy. And this kind of dark forest-style gameplay is still in an environment without any supervision.
MEME tokens are changing from a casino where everyone is looking for an angle to a hunting ground for technology and major players against ordinary investors. Perhaps users sometimes find it difficult to see through the tricks of the RUG players, but as the actual losses gradually expand, more and more users are painfully withdrawing from this dark forest.
According to a report from The Block, the trading volume of Pump.fun tokens on Solana has recently cooled down, with the daily average trading volume in the past week only $560 million, a new low since Christmas 2024, a sharp 82% drop from the single-day high of $31.3 billion three weeks ago.
The on-chain data of Solana also shows a similar trend. In the past three months, the number of active wallets on the Solana chain reached 7.22 million on November 16, but by February 1, this number had dropped to 3.18 million, a drop of more than 50%. And the active users of aggregators like Meteora and Jupiter, which were once hot due to the TRUMP token, have also plummeted after the heat cooled down.
Even many KOLs whose main business is MEME have claimed that the current environment is no longer suitable for "on-chain meme", and a blogger named Laughing said: "I have completely given up the gamble of opening MEME tokens, you can never beat those who sell lottery tickets."
Paradigm researcher Arjun Balaji bluntly pointed out that "Memecoins were once interesting and pure, but the industrialized trenches have turned an innocent PvP game into a predatory game dominated by internal advantages".
Although the market is becoming increasingly grim, we may still be able to gain some insights from the two-sided nature of the blockchain.
- On the one hand, the lack of regulation in the blockchain has led to the rampant malicious behavior of DEVs.
- On the other hand, it is precisely because of the traceability of the blockchain that, no matter how the opponent hides, we can always find some clues on the chain. For players who are dedicated to research, after becoming familiar with these malicious tricks, they can also avoid similar scams.
Furthermore, although the token retention rate of Pump.fun has dropped to one-ten-thousandth, players may also be able to directly avoid the needle-in-a-haystack approach in the earliest stages, and instead choose to let the bullets fly for a while, focusing on tokens that have been issued for more than 1 day and are still "alive". Time seems to be becoming the most practical filtering tool. As for those teams that hope to issue project tokens through MEME, due to such a market environment, sincerity has become a simple and effective narrative, as bad money is destroying the market, while good money will strike hard at bad money.
