Pump.fun’s biggest winners may be impossible to copy as $752 million study exposes hidden trading gap

Pump.fun copy traders risk following wallets whose multimillion-dollar gains come from transactions they cannot replicate, new blockchain research shows.

An Oct. 22 investigation by Bitquery found that only 26% of $752.5 million in large memecoin wallet gains passed its checks for conventional market trading, raising questions about the profitability rankings investors use to identify successful traders.

The study examined 3,170 wallet-token positions with reported gains of at least $100,000 between October 2025 and August 2026. It found that 51% of the gains involved wallets selling tokens received from other addresses, while another 13% exhibited patterns of potentially coordinated trading. The remaining 10% could not be conclusively classified.

The findings expose a weakness in crypto copy trading, where investors use automated platforms to mirror transactions made by wallets with strong historical returns.

These systems typically rely on observable purchases to establish positions. However, wallets receiving tokens through transfers can record substantial profits without executing a market purchase that followers could replicate.

The practice also appears to be growing. Bitquery found that transferred-token sales accounted for seven out of every 10 large wallet wins in August, after remaining below 100 cases monthly until July.

The shift suggests that traders increasingly relying on wallet leaderboards could encounter apparently profitable addresses whose trading histories provide little indication of the returns available to outside investors.

Bitquery identified 1,579 profitable positions where most of the tokens sold had arrived through transfers rather than purchases recorded by the selling wallet.

Of those, 1,104 could be traced to addresses associated with the token's creator, either directly or through intermediary wallets.

This arrangement can distort address-level profit calculations because tracking platforms typically subtract recorded purchases from sales to determine profitability.

An investor might purchase tokens through one wallet, transfer them to another and subsequently sell them after a substantial price increase.

The receiving address could then display significant profits despite recording no acquisition cost. However, the investor's actual return would still depend on what the original wallet paid.

A copy trader monitoring the receiving address would see the eventual sale without receiving the purchase signal needed to enter the position at a comparable price.

Bitquery also identified 423 creator-linked transfers involving additional signing addresses. In one example involving the UOTF token, four temporary wallets received nearly eight million tokens each before forwarding them to selling addresses in a coordinated transaction.

One recipient subsequently sold its holdings for $1.59 million, producing a large apparent gain without a corresponding recorded market purchase.

Such transactions can make concentrated token distributions resemble successful trading activity across several independent wallets.

However, transfers can also occur between wallets belonging to the same legitimate investor. The absence of a recorded purchase therefore does not independently establish manipulation.