Gone in Six Seconds
One wallet launches about 425 meme coins a day and sells each one within seconds. We checked a viral thread about it against public records.
A single launcher wallet has created 146,731 coins on pump.fun since August 2025. It buys each coin the instant it creates it, sells into the first wave of buyers, and is out a median of 5–6 seconds later. A batch of fake-buyer wallets it pays for pile in right behind it, and the people who follow them lose about a quarter of what they put in within the first minute.
In plain English
- Who: one wallet (bwamJz…NfSXa) launching coins themed on the news of the moment: SI, AI, CYBER, ELON, over and over.
- How it earns: it is always the first and cheapest buyer, because it buys in the same transaction that creates the coin. It then sells to the people who rush in during the first seconds.
- The trick: wallets funded by the same operator buy right after it, so automatic copy-trading tools see "smart money" buying and follow. Coins where those wallets showed up earned the launcher about 15 times more. The fake buyers lose money on paper, but it is the dev's own money: the dev keeps refilling them, so that "loss" is just its cost of making coins look busy.
- Where the money goes: every night, after the launches stop, it sends the day's profit as one round-number transfer to a separate savings wallet (a vault), and most of it gets staked.
- Who pays: outside buyers in each coin's first 60 seconds. In the week we checked they put in roughly 54,000–72,000 SOL and got back 22–28% less.
Who makes money, and who loses it
In a random sample of 349 of its Oct 21–27 coins (11% of that week's launches), the dev made money on 302, lost on 28 and broke even on 19: about +959 SOL net. Scaled up to the whole week, that is about 7,750 SOL after estimated fees.
The real losers are the outside traders who buy in and get dumped on. In each coin's first 60 seconds they put in roughly 54,000–72,000 SOL and got back 22–28% less.
The 7 fake buyers are down about 4,323 SOL lifetime, but the dev funded them itself: 4,331.7 SOL in 172 transfers. That is money the dev spends to make its coins look busy, not a sign the dev is losing.
How the machine works
The same five steps, about 425 times a day, with a break of 7–10 hours every night.
- Launch on the news. A coin named after whatever is trending goes up within moments of the headline. In one week: SI 31 times, AI 27, CYBER 21, ELON 17.
- Buy first, in the create. In the same transaction that creates the coin, the wallet buys 5, 6 or 12 SOL of it, which is about 14–30% of the supply, at the lowest price there will ever be on its bonding curve.
- Bring in the fake buyers. Wallets the operator funds buy within 2–11 seconds. On tracking tools they look like successful traders, so copy bots follow them in.
- Sell into the rush. The first sell comes within 2 seconds on over half the coins. The wallet has sold everything a median 5–6 seconds after launch.
- Sweep every night. When launches stop, typically about 01:30–02:30 UTC, one round-number transfer (450–900 SOL that week) sweeps the day's profit to the vault.
The money map ?
An older launcher and two vaults surround the dev wallet. Profits flow out to the vaults and on into stake accounts. The fake buyers got their first SOL through one-use pass-through wallets, then the dev wallet topped them up directly. Hover or tap a dot to trace its money and see its Solscan links. Drag to rotate, scroll or pinch to zoom.
- Dev (launcher) wallet
- Older launcher
- Vault 1 (to Oct 15)
- Vault 2 (from Oct 17)
- Stake account
- Pass-through wallet
- Fake buyer (funded by the dev) 7
- Coin (sample)
- Dev profit on the sample: +959 SOL, up on 302 of 349 coins
What this means: the operator is not one wallet but a small system. The old launcher and vault 1 were already running in 2025. The dev wallet was started with 15 SOL from vault 1 and 4.937 SOL from the old launcher. Since then it has sent its profits back to the vaults every night. On the 349 sample coins the dev came out ahead on 302 (about +959 SOL net). The fake buyers' losses are SOL the dev sent them itself; the money it actually takes comes from outside buyers.
What the data shows
Six views of the same machine: the funding, the trading, the schedule and the payout.
41 seconds to set up the fake buyers
Oct 21, 2026, from 01:55:58 to 01:56:42 UTC (9:55–9:56 PM ET on Oct 20)
A typical coin's first 20 seconds
$CI, created Oct 27 at 23:09:22 UTC. Every trade, stacked by the second it happened
Coins with fake buyers vs without
The dev wallet's estimated profit for the week, after an estimated trading fee
What the fake buyers made on the dev's coins
Net SOL on the dev's SOL-priced coins, Oct 21–27, from each wallet's full trade list
When it launches: the nightly break
pump.fun launches per hour, UTC (ET = UTC − 4 h), Oct 19–28. Darker means more launches
The nightly sweeps
Each square is a day; the number is SOL sent from the dev wallet to a vault. August and October 2026
The thread, claim by claim
The original article is by @the_smart_ape on X. "Matches" means our figure agrees within normal measurement differences. "Unverified" means we could not pull the data, and we do not estimate it.
| The thread says | Verdict | What we measured |
|---|
A second opinion: pumpdata.fun
pumpdata.fun, a pump.fun data service, published its own check of the same thread on Oct 29. We compared notes.
Where we agree
Where we disagree
What this means for everyday buyers
These are risk signals measured from the data, not investment advice.
Who ends up paying
- Buying in the first seconds is not "early". The launcher was there at second zero, at the lowest possible price. Anyone buying in the first minute is mostly buying what it is selling.
- Outside buyers lost about a quarter. In the first 60 seconds of this wallet's coins, everyone else put in tens of thousands of SOL and got back 22–28% less, depending on how you count.
- A wallet that looks smart can be bait. The fake buyers lose money on the launcher's coins every week, and the operator refills them. On other coins some of them make money, so they look skilled on tracking sites.
Warning signs you can check
- The coin is under 10 seconds old. 79% of this wallet's coins were fully sold by their creator within 10 seconds.
- The creator has thousands of launches. Any explorer shows a wallet's history. 146,731 launches is a production line, not a project.
- The name is a repeat. If it's the 27th AI coin this week from the same creator, it's a template.
- The "smart money" is brand new. Six of these buyer wallets were created and funded in the same 41 seconds. Check who funded a wallet before copying it.
How we did it
We read the public records ourselves and followed the money transfer by transfer.
- Find the wallet. We sampled 1,041 live pump.fun launches, grouped them by creator and looked up each creator's lifetime launch count. Only one creator had more than 100,000, and its week matched the thread's tickers.
- Rebuild the week. We listed the wallet's launches for Oct 21–27 and pulled the first trades of a random 349 of them (11%) to measure the buys, sells and timing. We scaled those up to the whole week.
- Follow the money. Using Solana's public RPC interface, we read the wallet's very first transactions, every transfer into both vaults that we report, and each fake buyer's funding trail.
- Settle the fake-buyer question. For each of the 7 wallets we pulled its full trade list for the week and checked a random sample of trades against the raw transactions. For the six new wallets we also compared what went in against what is left.
- Price it. SOL amounts are converted to dollars at that day's closing price (Kraken SOL/USD).
Tools and sources: public Solana RPC nodes, the Solana Tracker data API (free tier), the pump.fun public site, pumpdata.fun's free lookups, Kraken daily prices, and Python for the analysis. three.js and Chart.js for the visuals. No paid or private data.
Download the data (JSON) · every wallet and transaction listed is public and can be looked up on Solscan.
The wallets
Click any address to see it on Solscan, a public Solana explorer.
Words used on this page
Plain definitions. Dotted-underlined words show the same definition when you hover or tap them.
- Solana
- A public blockchain network. Anyone can create a token on it in seconds, and every transaction is recorded publicly.
- SOL
- Solana's own currency. During this study 1 SOL was worth about $100 (Oct 29 close: $100.17).
- pump.fun
- A website for launching meme coins in one click. Every coin starts on a bonding curve.
- Bonding curve
- pump.fun's built-in pricing formula. Each new coin starts at the same tiny price, and every purchase moves the price up a fixed curve. The first buyer always gets the lowest price.
- Create transaction
- The single transaction that brings a new coin into existence. This wallet adds its own purchase to that same transaction, so nobody can buy before it.
- Dev, launcher, deployer
- The wallet that creates a coin. Here, one wallet that created 146,731 of them.
- Wallet
- An account on a blockchain, identified by a long string of letters and numbers, with no name attached.
- Vault
- A separate wallet where the operator parks profits. It doesn't trade; it receives the nightly sweeps and stakes them.
- Sweep
- Moving a day's accumulated profit out of the trading wallet in one transfer.
- Staking, stake account
- Locking SOL in a special account to help secure the network in exchange for a yield, a bit like interest. It can be unlocked later.
- Fake buyer (bait wallet)
- A wallet funded by the operator that buys the operator's own coins right after launch, so it looks like real demand.
- Pass-through wallet
- A new wallet that receives money and passes it all on seconds later, then is never used again.
- Copy bot
- An automated tool that copies the trades of wallets that look successful, in real time.
- PnL (profit and loss)
- What a wallet made or lost: money out minus money in, after fees.
- RPC (Remote Procedure Call)
- The standard way to ask a blockchain node for its records, such as a wallet's transactions.
- UTC and ET
- UTC is the world reference clock. US Eastern Time (ET) is currently 4 hours behind UTC.
- Ticker
- A coin's short name, like $AI or $ELON. Anyone can reuse a ticker.
- SOL-priced coin
- A coin whose bonding curve trades against SOL. About a third of this wallet's coins trade against other tokens instead.