A new Bitquery study challenges the apparent profits behind some of Pump.fun’s biggest winning wallets, finding that transfers and linked-wallet trading account for much of the money shown by profit trackers.
The October 22 report examines 3,170 gains of at least $100,000 completed between October 30, 2025 and August 30, 2026. Trackers assigned those positions $752.5 million in profits. Bitquery classified 26% of that value as ordinary trading profit, 51% as token hand-offs, 13% as wash loops and the remainder as unresolved.
The percentages concern dollars in a selected historical sample. They do not say that 26% of all Pump.fun users are profitable or that every other participant committed fraud.
A wallet’s proceeds are not always its owner’s profit
A simple example shows the accounting problem. Suppose one address buys tokens for $20,000, transfers them to another address it controls and that second address sells for $25,000.
A tracker looking only at the second address may see no purchase cost and $25,000 of proceeds. Across the two addresses, the position produced $5,000 before fees. The missing purchase history changes the apparent result without changing a single trade.
Transfers can have legitimate purposes, including custody changes and distributing assets. The reporting problem is treating an incomplete history as proof that a trader turned a tiny investment into a fortune. Establishing ownership and cost across addresses is a separate task.
Related buyers can make performance look stronger
Bitquery’s wash-loop test required a dominant buyer and direct transfer links to the seller or token creator. It says results depend partly on the threshold used to define buyer dominance.
That is evidence assessed through a method, rather than a court finding about named people. A transfer link can justify further scrutiny while leaving the economic relationship between the parties uncertain.
For a reader considering a celebrated trade, the practical question is whether an unrelated participant could have executed the same sale. A large recorded receipt does not establish that enough independent buying was available for somebody else to repeat it.
Our guide to liquidity, spreads and slippage explains why a quoted value and an executable exit are different. The same distinction applies when impressive wallet results are used to attract followers or copy traders.
The sample leaves important limits
The study excludes coins with fewer than 500 trades, traces hand-offs only one step back and does not deduct transaction fees. Its transfer records end in August, so later wins are outside the analysis.
Those limits prevent the findings from being treated as a complete account of today’s memecoin market. They still expose a useful weakness in performance claims: following the selling address alone can miss who paid for the position and who funded the buyer. A credible profit record needs that wider economic history.