Study Classifies 26% of Tracked Pump.fun-Linked Gains as Trading Profit

An Oct. 22 analysis classified 26% of tracked gains tied to large Pump.fun-linked wallet positions as profit from ordinary buying and selling. The findings point to a gap between wallet leaderboard results and trades a follower may be able to mirror.

The analysis covered 3,170 wallet-token wins of at least $100,000 that ended between Oct. 30, 2025, and Aug. 30, 2026. Profit trackers assigned those positions $752.5 million in gains. The analysis classified $193.9 million of that total as real trading profit, meaning the wallet bought tokens and later sold them to other traders. Transaction fees were not deducted.

Sales of tokens received from another address accounted for 51% of reported gains. Another 13% came from patterns classified as wash loops, while 10% could not be confirmed either way. These categories describe transaction patterns; they do not establish who controlled the wallets or why the transactions occurred.

A wallet that receives tokens by transfer can later show a sale without a matching purchase in its own history. A copy-trading bot following that wallet may therefore have no buy transaction to mirror. The analysis measured wallet positions, not copy-trader performance, so it does not show how much of the displayed profit followers could reproduce.

Among the 25 largest wins, 15 were classified as wash loops and six as token hand-offs. The other four were real trades or could not be proven either way. Of 1,579 wins where most sold tokens had arrived by transfer, 1,104 could be traced to addresses associated with a token’s creator.

Hand-offs accounted for seven in 10 large wins in August 2026. The transfer records ended Aug. 30, 2026, leaving 2,943 later wins of at least $100,000 outside the transfer analysis.

The findings add a separate constraint to an earlier two-minute-delay test of Solana copy trading: a follower may lack a purchase to copy when the tracked wallet received its tokens by transfer.