Bitquery Study Reveals 74% of Pump.fun Gains Cannot Be Replicated by Copy Traders

Bitquery's October 22 investigation found that only 26% of $752.5 million in sampled memecoin wallet gains passed checks for conventional market trading. The findings suggest that Pump.fun copy traders risk following profitable wallets whose transactions cannot be replicated. Bitquery examined 3,170 wallet-token positions with reported gains of at least $100,000 between October 2025 and August 2026. Bitquery attributed 51% of the gains to wallets selling transferred tokens and identified potentially coordinated trading patterns in another 13%. Bitquery could not conclusively classify the remaining 10%.

Copy-trading services generally use automated systems to reproduce transactions by wallets with strong past returns. These systems typically need an observable purchase to establish a position, whereas transferred tokens can generate recorded profits without a purchase followers can copy. Bitquery found that transferred-token sales represented seven out of every 10 large wallet wins in August, after monthly counts stayed below 100 until July. The shift suggests that investors increasingly using wallet rankings could encounter profitable-looking addresses whose histories reveal little about returns available to outsiders.

Bitquery identified 1,579 profitable positions in which transfers supplied most of the tokens sold rather than purchases recorded by the selling wallet. Bitquery traced 1,104 of those positions to addresses associated with token creators, directly or through intermediary wallets. Transfers can distort address-level profit calculations because tracking services generally calculate profits by deducting recorded purchases from sales. An investor could buy tokens through one wallet, transfer the tokens to another wallet and sell after a large price increase. The receiving wallet could show substantial profits without recorded acquisition costs, although the investor's actual return would depend on the original purchase price. A follower monitoring the receiving wallet would observe the sale without the earlier purchase signal needed to enter at a comparable price.

Bitquery identified 423 creator-linked transfers that involved additional signing addresses. In a UOTF example, four temporary wallets each received nearly eight million tokens before forwarding the tokens to selling addresses through a coordinated transaction. One recipient later sold the transferred holdings for $1.59 million, showing a large apparent profit without a corresponding recorded market purchase. Such transactions can make concentrated token allocations look like successful trading by multiple independent wallets. However, legitimate investors can transfer tokens between wallets under common ownership, so an absent purchase record alone does not establish manipulation.

Bitquery found that 15 of the 25 largest reported gains satisfied criteria for wash loops, combining concentrated buying with direct financial connections between wallets. One Arena wallet recorded approximately $4.92 million in sales after spending $4,223. Another address, previously funded by the apparent winner, supplied 99% of buying activity during the holding period. Bitquery said the seller had sent that buyer more than $1.4 million in SOL during the preceding two days. The pattern raises doubts about whether outsiders could achieve comparable returns without the same buying support.

The findings increase scrutiny of analytics used by services such as GMGN, which lets investors monitor wallets and automatically copy trades. GMGN's documentation uses the labels "Didn't buy" and "Sold > Bought" to flag transferred tokens or sales exceeding recorded acquisitions. However, those warnings do not establish whether followers could have achieved the profits displayed for a wallet. GMGN triggers copied purchases from monitored wallets' buying transactions, while proportional selling covers only tokens purchased through the copy-trading service. A transfer into a monitored wallet therefore supplies no market purchase for an automated follower to reproduce.

GMGN lets users set liquidity, market capitalization and transaction-size filters that may block copied orders even when monitored wallets make conventional purchases. GMGN charges a 1% handling fee for each transaction, with network and priority costs charged separately. Slippage and execution delays can also lower returns, especially when followers copy rapid trading. Bitquery identified genuine profitable trading, including a SOULGUY position that earned $3.3 million through 3,632 trades. Followers would need frequent transactions at sufficiently competitive prices to reproduce that performance.

GMGN records copied orders that succeed or fail, providing a basis for comparing monitored wallet activity with actual execution. However, GMGN's published documentation does not establish whether wallet profitability rankings adjust for transferred inventory or achievable follower returns. Bitquery did not measure copy traders' actual performance, leaving unresolved how much of the $752.5 million in sampled gains followers could have replicated. Another 2,943 positions with six-figure gains closed after the August cutoff and remain outside Bitquery's transfer analysis. Examining those positions together with completed and missed copied orders would help determine how much wallet-ranking profitability represents executable trading opportunities.