I’ve been trading memecoins for 3 years now, and one of the things that bothers me the most about the current state of the trenches is how difficult it has become to distinguish genuine demand from something that was manufactured before you even discovered the token.
I’m sure you’ve seen this happen hundreds of times.
A new token launches on Pumpfun, It starts getting some traction, the holder count increases, volume looks decent, a few familiar accounts start talking about it, and suddenly it’s at $50K market cap.
Then it dies.
Sometimes it reaches $100K or $200K.
Occasionally even $300K, but the result is usually the same, the chart collapses, everyone starts blaming the lack of buyers, and another token appears a few minutes later.
I used to think a lot of these launches simply failed because there wasn’t enough demand.
And of course, sometimes that’s exactly what happens.
But there’s another explanation that I think more people need to understand.
A significant part of the demand you’re seeing was never real in the first place.
The game changed in 2024
Back when memecoin trading was less competitive, getting into a token early could genuinely give you an advantage.
You found something interesting, bought before everyone else, waited for the narrative to spread, and hopefully sold into stronger demand.
It was risky, obviously, but at least there was a reasonable chance that the people buying alongside you were independent traders making their own decisions.
Today, a token can appear to have hundreds of holders and significant trading activity while a single group effectively controls much of its supply.
And the worst part is that this can happen before the average trader even sees the token.
This is where bundling comes in.
A bundle allows multiple transactions to be executed together in the same Solana block.
Using infrastructure such as Jito, a token creator can coordinate the launch and purchases from several wallets, securing a substantial portion of the supply at the earliest prices.
Those wallets might look unrelated when you first inspect the holders.
But economically, they can all belong to the same person.
Imagine launching a token and acquiring 40% of its supply through ten different wallets.
To someone looking at the distribution, it might appear that ten independent traders bought early.
In reality, you’re looking at one entity controlling ten wallets.
The numbers are worse than I expected
Bitquery analyzed 8.2 million Pumpfun launches between October 2025 and October 2026.
Their findings are pretty revealing (and ugly lol).
In 21% of launches, wallets associated with the developer participated in the launch bundle, holding a median of 10% of the supply.
The research also attributed $579 million in profits to developers and their associated bundled wallets across the measured period.
And in 65% of the tokens studied, the developer began selling within the first minute.
Think about that last number for a moment man.
We’re talking about people launching tokens and beginning to exit before most retail traders have even had time to understand what they’re buying.
Bitquery documented one particularly ridiculous example from June 2026.
A developer launched a token with a tiny initial purchase.
Four wallets in the same Jito bundle acquired 79% of the supply for $6,000, the token graduated almost immediately, over the next 18 minutes, 1,138 wallets entered.
By then, five early wallets had sold their positions for $121,000, after spending $11,000, 11x return in 18 minutes.
And somebody had to provide the money for that return, spoiler, it was the retail.
Even the volume is lying to you
This is simply depressing.
Volume used to be one of the first things I checked when evaluating a token.
If something was doing significant volume relative to its market cap, that could indicate genuine interest.
But what happens when generating fake volume becomes a service anyone can purchase?
According to another Bitquery investigation, $117.7 billion of the $201.4 billion in Solana DEX volume across the pools it analyzed during a 30-day period was classified as non-genuine trading.
58%.
And a huge portion came from extremely simple behavior: coordinated buying and selling of the same token within a single transaction.
In other words, numbers that appear to represent people trading can instead represent bots repeatedly moving assets around.
Now combine that with artificial holder counts.
A developer can distribute small quantities of tokens across dozens of wallets, generate repetitive trading activity, and make the project appear considerably more popular than it actually is.
Then comes the marketing, you already know how this game works, few Telegram groups start mentioning it, some accounts on X post about the chart.
A KOL makes a call and the moment you see it, you are late, game over brother.
Except much of it may have been coordinated by the same people who are waiting to sell.
And this is why I think so many tokens die at $50K market cap, we are now celebrating 200k toppers, come on.
The big KOL problem
I’ve spent enough time on CT to know that not every person promoting a token is involved in a coordinated operation.
Some people genuinely believe in what they’re buying.
Some are simply wrong, and some, yeah, they are getting paid.
The problem is that these three groups can look exactly the same to someone scrolling through X.
If you start selling immediately after publishing, the people trusting your recommendation are effectively providing your exit liquidity.
Now imagine doing that repeatedly.
Different token, different ticker, different narrative.
Same result.
This is why I think looking at someone’s trading history is becoming just as important as looking at the token itself.
A KOL having a profitable entry doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good at identifying opportunities.
Sometimes it just means they entered before the audience they were about to send toward the token.
Nobody talks about who was selling while the call was being made, people forgets so fast here.
So how do you actually protect yourself?
I don’t think the solution is to stop trading every token that has a bundle.
Not every bundle is malicious. Some teams use coordinated launches to manage sniper activity, and independent snipers can also buy in the first block without being connected to the developer.
The important distinction is what those wallets do afterward.
Personally, I think traders need to spend considerably more time understanding who owns the supply.
Tools like Bubblemaps, Trench Radar and Solscan make it possible to investigate early buyers, wallet connections and token distribution.
If a group of wallets bought a substantial percentage of the supply in the launch block, I want to know whether they’re still holding it.
If several top holders received their SOL from the same source, I want to understand why.
If a token suddenly has extraordinary volume despite limited liquidity, I want to know whether that volume reflects independent buying and selling.
And if someone is aggressively promoting it, I want to know whether their wallet is accumulating or distributing.
There’s another problem, though.
The people running these operations are also getting better, so they adapt.
They use different funding sources, spread purchases across several blocks, recycle wallets and find new ways to make coordinated activity look organic.
Which means that the tools helping retail traders identify manipulation will never be a perfect solution.
You still have to think.
The bigger problem with the trenches
Solidus Labs estimated that 98.6% of Pumpfun tokens in its studied period exhibited pump-and-dump characteristics.
And I think this is one of the reasons the trenches are so different now.
People keep asking where the next PNUT is.
Where the next token that goes from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of millions is.
Why nothing seems capable of sustaining a narrative anymore.
Well, perhaps part of the answer is that we’ve built an entire industry around extracting liquidity before a narrative has the chance to develop.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult for genuine communities to compete with people whose entire business model is manufacturing the appearance of a community.
And I think that’s a much bigger issue than people realize.
Where does this leave us?
I still believe there are opportunities in memecoins.
I wouldn’t be spending time following this market if I thought otherwise.
But I also think the days of blindly buying whatever starts trending and expecting the market to reward you are disappearing.
Being early isn’t enough when someone else already owns half the supply before you arrive.
You now need to understand the structure of the trade.
Again, I don’t think memecoins are going away.
But I do think this constant extraction is slowly destroying the conditions that made the trenches interesting in the first place.
And until that changes, I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue celebrating tokens that manage to survive beyond $500K market cap.
Which is pretty sad when you remember what this market used to be.
