Written by: StarPlatinum_
Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
I've been trading meme coins for three years. The thing that bothers me most about this market right now is this: it's already very hard to tell whether the buy-side pressure for a token comes from real buyers, or from an illusion created by the project team before you even saw it.
This scenario has repeated hundreds of times. A new token launches on Pumpfun, starts to get some heat, holders increase, volume looks okay, a few familiar faces start discussing it, market cap suddenly reaches $50,000, and then it goes to zero. Sometimes it can push to $100,000 or $200,000, occasionally $300,000, but the ending is similar: the price crashes, everyone starts complaining that there aren't enough buyers, and a few minutes later, another token pops up.
I used to think many projects failed simply because demand wasn't enough. But there's another explanation I think more people should know: a large part of the community heat you see was fake from the very beginning.
In 2024, the rules changed
When meme coins weren't this competitive, getting in early really was an advantage. You found something interesting, bought before everyone else, waited for the narrative to spread, and then hoped to sell to stronger demand. There was risk, of course, but at least there was a decent chance the people buying alongside you were making independent decisions.
Today is different. A token can appear to have hundreds of holders and fairly active trading, while in reality most of the supply is held by the same group. Worst of all, all of this can happen before ordinary traders even notice the token.
This is what "bundling" is for. With tools like Jito, token creators can coordinate multiple wallets to buy at the same time, locking in a substantial portion of supply at the earliest prices. The first time you look at the holder list, these wallets may seem unrelated. But based on funding links, they can belong to the same person.
Imagine this: launch a token, use ten wallets to acquire 40% of the supply. People looking at the holdings distribution will think these are ten independent traders who bought early. In reality, one entity controls ten wallets.
The numbers are worse than I expected
Bitquery analyzed 8.2 million Pumpfun projects between October 2025 and October 2026, and the conclusions are ugly.
21% of Pumpfun projects had wallets associated with the developer participating in launch bundling, with a median holding of 10% of supply. During the research period, developers and their associated bundled wallets made a combined profit of $579 million. More critically, among the tokens studied, 65% of developers began selling in the first minute after launch.
Think about that number. Most retail traders hadn't even figured out what they were buying before someone had already started exiting.
Bitquery documented an extreme case in June 2026. A developer launched a token with an extremely small initial buy. Four wallets in the same Jito bundle spent $6,000 to acquire 79% of the supply. The token "graduated" almost immediately, and over the next 18 minutes, 1,138 wallets poured in. At that point, five early wallets had already sold their holdings for $121,000—they had spent a total of $11,000, an 11x return in 18 minutes. Someone has to pay for that money, and spoiler alert: it's retail.
Even volume is lying to you
This is really frustrating. Volume used to be one of the first things I looked at when evaluating a token. If a project's volume is large relative to its market cap, it may indicate real interest. But what happens when generating fake volume becomes a service anyone can buy?
According to another Bitquery investigation, during the 30 days it analyzed, 58% of the $201.4 billion in Solana DEX pool volume was classified as non-real trading, about $117.7 billion. A large portion came from extremely simple operations: coordinating buys and sells of the same token within the same transaction. In other words, the data that looks like someone is trading may behind the scenes just be bots repeatedly buying and selling.
Then layer on artificially manipulated holder counts. Developers can spread a small amount of tokens across dozens of wallets, create repeated transactions, and make a project look far hotter than it really is. Then comes marketing—you already know this playbook. A few Telegram groups start mentioning it, some accounts on X post charts, a KOL calls it, and by the time you see it, it's already too late. Game over. Except all of this was likely coordinated by the same group of people waiting to sell.
This is also why I think so many tokens die at a $50,000 market cap.
The KOL calling the coin may be distributing
I've spent enough time on Crypto Twitter to know that not everyone promoting a token is involved in coordinated manipulation. Some genuinely believe in what they bought, some are simply wrong, and some, yes, are paid. The problem is that these three types of people can look exactly the same to someone scrolling through Twitter.
If you start selling immediately after posting a recommendation, the people who trust your recommendation are effectively providing liquidity for your exit. Imagine doing this repeatedly: different tokens, different tickers, different narratives, same result. That's why I think looking at a person's trading history is becoming as important as looking at the token itself. A KOL with a profitable entry record doesn't necessarily mean he's good at spotting opportunities. Sometimes it just means he entered before the audience he was about to lead into that token. No one talks about who is selling when the call is being made.
So how do you protect yourself?
I don't think the solution is to stop trading every token with bundling. Not every bundle is malicious. Some teams use coordinated launches to manage sniping, and independent snipers may also buy in the first block without any connection to the developer. The key difference is what these wallets do afterward.
Personally, I think traders need to spend more time figuring out who owns the supply. Tools like Bubblemaps, Trench Radar, and Solscan can help you check early buyers, wallet connections, and token distribution. If a group of wallets bought a substantial percentage of supply in the launch block, I want to know whether they still hold it. If the SOL behind several top holders comes from the same source, I want to understand why. If a token has limited liquidity but suddenly shows abnormal volume, I want to know whether that is independent buying and selling. If someone is aggressively promoting it, I want to know whether his wallet is accumulating or distributing.
But there's another problem: the manipulators are improving too, and they will adapt. They use different funding sources, spread purchases across multiple blocks, recycle wallets, and find new ways to make coordinated behavior look natural. That means tools that help retail identify manipulation will never be perfect. You still have to use your own head.
The deeper problem
Solidus Labs estimates that during its research period, 98.6% of Pumpfun tokens exhibited pump-and-dump characteristics. I think this is one of the reasons the current market feels so different. People keep asking: where is the next PNUT? Where is the next token that goes from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of millions? Why does it seem like nothing can sustain a narrative?
Perhaps part of the answer is that this industry has become a business—one that drains liquidity before the narrative even takes shape. Real communities are increasingly finding it hard to compete with another group of people whose entire business model is to manufacture the appearance of a "community." I think this problem is much bigger than many people realize.
What this means
I still believe there are opportunities in meme coins, otherwise I wouldn't spend time tracking this market. But I also think the days of blindly buying anything that starts trending and hoping the market rewards you are disappearing. When others already own half the supply by the time you buy, being "early" is not enough. You now need to understand the structure of the trade.
Again, I don't think meme coins will disappear. But the market being drained like this is gradually destroying the very conditions that made it fun back then. Thinking about what this market used to be like, it's honestly pretty sad.