Pump.fun top wallets: most of $752M in gains can't be copied

Only about a quarter of the biggest memecoin wallet profits on Pump.fun looked like trading that someone else could actually copy, according to a 22 October study by blockchain data firm Bitquery, summarised by CryptoSlate. The rest came from tokens that arrived by transfer, from wallets linked to token creators or from apparent wash trading, none of which a copy-trading bot can see in time to follow.

What Bitquery measured

• Sample: 3,170 wallet-token positions with reported gains of at least $100,000 between October 2025 and August 2026, worth $752.5 million in total.
• Passed the checks: 26% of those gains looked like conventional market trading.
• Transferred tokens: 51% involved wallets selling tokens they had received from other addresses, so there was no visible purchase to copy. Of 1,579 such positions, 1,104 traced back to addresses linked to the token's creator.
• Coordinated patterns: another 13% showed signs of coordination; 10% could not be classified.
• Wash loops at the top: 15 of the 25 largest gains met Bitquery's criteria for wash loops. In one Arena trade, a wallet spent $4,223 and recorded about $4.92 million in sales, while a wallet it had funded with more than $1.4 million in SOL supplied 99% of the buying.

The trend is getting worse: transferred-token sales made up seven of every ten large wins in August, after staying below 100 cases a month until July.

Our take: the leaderboard is the product, not the proof

None of this means every winning wallet is a scam. Bitquery itself notes that people move tokens between their own wallets, so a missing purchase does not prove manipulation. But wallet trackers usually calculate profit as sales minus recorded purchases, and a wallet that received its tokens for free will look like a genius. Platforms such as GMGN already flag "Didn't buy" and "Sold > Bought" wallets; those labels deserve far more attention than the profit column.

The practical point is simple. Copy trading only works if you can enter at roughly the same price as the wallet you follow, and in more than half of these cases that entry never happened on the open market. Before mirroring anyone, read our explainer on how crypto copy trading works and where it fails, and keep the usual memecoin and rug pull warnings in mind. Pump.fun, meanwhile, keeps adding riskier products, such as its new perpetual futures through Hyperliquid.