Author: Frank, PANews
Issuing 11 tokens in 3 days, a 100% win rate, and a profit of $25,000. This may be the ideal self of countless MEME players. But the reality is, this is just one of the hundreds of addresses of an industrialized RUG team. While retail investors are still rushing for the "thousand-fold myth", professional teams have used bots, multi-signature contracts, and sentiment engines to transform the MEME track into a 24-hour harvesting machine. On-chain data shows that such industrialized RUG operations are not isolated cases.
From tracing the source of funds to the initial addresses on the exchanges, to the hundreds of related wallets derived, a "dark game" orchestrated by technology, capital, and human greed is devouring the wallets of speculators.
$25,000 in a single address in 3 days, hundreds of addresses forming a RUG pipeline
PANews uses on-chain data to dissect the complete harvesting route and tries to reveal a cruel reality: when the issuance of MEME coins becomes a mathematical probability game, and when the "community consensus" is mass-produced by industrialized water armies, the finale of this carnival may have been predetermined.
Take this address as an example, FrRqEYFfJ3VEHodfiZdrPnM3vAHTm2u9ewBN6HR9RxZE (hereinafter referred to as "FrRqE") has issued 11 MEME tokens in the past 3 days, with a total profit of $25,000 and a 100% win rate.
How was this achieved? From the holding time, FrRqE's buying and selling intervals are only a few tens of seconds, and no more than 1 minute at most. First, FrRqE will buy a large amount of the token after the opening, usually about 48 SOL, so that other users see that there is a big player buying the token, and they will quickly follow up and buy it, while FrRqE's holding has already exceeded 70%. He will then sell these tokens all at once in a few tens of seconds. The average profit rate is about 20% to 30%, and the profit per transaction is about $2,500.
Of course, now that various monitoring tools are very sophisticated, when the developer's holding ratio is too high, many experienced old players will not buy in blindly.
Therefore, FrRqE will quickly distribute these tokens to 400 wallet addresses after a single large purchase, in order to avoid on-chain bot monitoring. And when more and more addresses buy in, and the Pump internal pool is about to be filled, FrRqE will repeat the trick, transfer all the tokens back to the same address, and then sell them all at once, instantly reducing the tokens to zero.
Interestingly, the source of funds for this address seems to be deliberately hiding something. After more than a hundred on-chain penetrations, PANews finally saw that the initial source of funds for this address came from the OKX exchange, with the initial receiving address being 3SrXcoKQ97xwFAwELnraHtpuycjGvmG82E9SBGs6UcQd.
From the operation time, this address has been carrying out such activities for more than 2 months. Each time an address issues about 10 tokens, the funds will be transferred to a new address to start the next round of RUG, and so far hundreds of RUG addresses have been derived.
Of course, in addition to these on-chain actions, the DEV who wants to complete the RUG needs to do more, such as these tokens in the Pump internal pool usually have dozens or even hundreds of replies, and in the early stage, the traces of large-scale bot buying can be clearly seen. Both in terms of trading volume and discussion, it makes users feel that this project is a normal MEME token.
Even more terrifying is that these tokens are not specially selected and discovered by PANews, but are accidentally discovered on the surface of Pump.fun. For users who frequently participate in MEME investment, they should often encounter similar RUG traps.
The operation process of such RUG traps is not something that ordinary users can achieve. First, you need professional address distribution tools and aggregation addresses to complete flexible and unified token transfer operations. Second, you need real-time monitoring tools for social media hot spots to ensure that each token issuance is on the latest hot spot. Third, you also need a large number of Pump.fun water armies and social media water armies, such as the @r 999 d 999 z account, which was created in January 2025 and has repeatedly promoted FrRqE's tokens, and the two seem to have a close relationship. Fourth, a dedicated trading bot responsible for hype and sending packaged transactions. To complete the above steps, it may really require a powerful technical team and an operation team to achieve.
A retention rate of one in ten thousand, the MEME forest has no place for retail investors
According to dexscreener data, in the past six months, among the tokens issued on Pump.fun, the number of tokens with a current market value of over $50,000 is 1,987, of which only 27 tokens have survived for more than 1 month since issuance. There are 72 tokens that have survived for more than 1 day, and the remaining 1,915 were issued within the last 24 hours. There are 6 tokens issued yesterday. Calculated at this ratio, on February 13, there were 49,153 tokens issued on Pump.fun, with a graduation rate of 1.23%, and 606 tokens graduated. The proportion of graduated tokens that can still maintain a market value of over $50,000 within 1 day is 0.9%. From the overall data, the probability of a token issued on pump.fun being able to maintain a market value of over $50,000 one day after issuance is about one in ten thousand.
We take the 6 tokens that were still in existence after being issued on February 13 as research samples, and see what characteristics these surviving tokens have (during the observation process, the sample size has dropped from 6 to 4).
By examining these four tokens, we can summarize several characteristics. First, the tokens behind these are all project tokens or have clear spokespersons. Three of them are AI-related projects, and one is a personal token issued by an internet celebrity. There are no randomly issued tokens by ordinary players.
Second, the LP lock-up ratios of these tokens are very high, basically above 95%, and the lock-up amounts are all over $100,000. Third, the number of followers on social media is all over 2,000, and although the creation time of several accounts is not long, due to the interaction with KOLs, their social media scores are not low.
In summary, the PVP era seems to be over, and individually issued tokens in this market are almost impossible to break out or reach a high market value. This is something that many experienced players may have known. In this context, the DEVs who still choose to issue a large number of tokens every day obviously have their own unique business models. And this dark forest-style gameplay is still in an unregulated environment.
Depleting the pond, a large number of players are painfully withdrawing
The MEME coin track is transforming from a casino where everyone is looking for an angle to a hunting ground for technology and major players against ordinary retail investors. Users may sometimes find it difficult to see through the tricks of the RUG players, but as the actual losses gradually expand, more and more users are painfully withdrawing from this dark forest.
According to a report by The Block, the trading volume of Pump.fun tokens on Solana has cooled recently, with a daily average trading volume of only $560 million in the past week, a new low since Christmas 2024, down 82% from the single-day high of $3.13 billion three weeks ago.
Data on the Solana chain also shows a similar trend. In the past three months, the number of active wallets on the Solana chain reached 7.22 million on November 16, but by February 1, the number had dropped to 3.18 million, a drop of more than half. And the activity of aggregators like Meteora and Jupiter, which were once hot due to the TRUMP token, has also plummeted after the heat cooled down.
Even some KOLs whose main business is MEME claim that the current environment is no longer suitable for "on-chain meme", and a blogger named Laughing said: "I have completely given up betting on the opening pvp of meme, and those who play the lottery can never beat those who sell the lottery".
Arjun Balaji, a researcher at Paradigm, pointed out bluntly that "Memecoins used to be interesting and pure, but the industrialized trenches have turned an innocent PvP game into a predatory game dominated by internal advantages".
Although the market is becoming increasingly grim, we may still be able to gain some insights from the two-sided nature of the blockchain. On the one hand, the lack of regulation in the blockchain has led to the rampant malicious DEVs. On the other hand, it is precisely because of the traceability of the blockchain that we can always find some clues on the chain, no matter how the opponent hides. For players who are dedicated to research, after mastering these malicious tricks, they can also avoid similar scams.
In addition, although the token retention rate of Pump.fun has dropped to one-ten-thousandth, players may also be able to directly avoid the needle-in-a-haystack in the earliest stage, and instead choose to let the bullets fly for a while, focusing on the tokens that have been issued for more than 1 day and are still "alive". Time seems to be becoming the most practical screening tool. As for those teams that hope to issue project tokens through MEME, due to such a market environment, sincerity has become a simple and effective narrative, and bad coins are destroying the market, while good coins will strike hard at bad coins.
