Pump.fun’s biggest winners may be impossible to copy as $752 million study exposes hidden trading gap

Bitquery examined 3,170 wallet-token positions with reported gains of at least $100,000 between October 2025 and August 2026. The study found that 51% of the gains involved wallets selling tokens received from other addresses, while another 13% exhibited patterns of potentially coordinated trading.

These findings expose a weakness in crypto copy trading, where investors use automated platforms to mirror transactions made by wallets with strong historical returns. The systems typically rely on observable purchases to establish positions, but wallets receiving tokens through transfers can record substantial profits without executing a market purchase that followers could replicate.

The practice appears to be growing. Bitquery found that transferred-token sales accounted for seven out of every 10 large wallet wins in August, after remaining below 100 cases monthly until July.

Hidden profit sources

Bitquery identified 1,579 profitable positions where most of the tokens sold had arrived through transfers rather than purchases recorded by the selling wallet. Of those, 1,104 could be traced to addresses associated with the token's creator, either directly or through intermediary wallets.

This arrangement can distort address-level profit calculations because tracking platforms typically subtract recorded purchases from sales to determine profitability. An investor might purchase tokens through one wallet, transfer them to another and subsequently sell them after a substantial price increase.

The receiving address could then display significant profits despite recording no acquisition cost. However, the investor's actual return would still depend on what the original wallet paid. A copy trader monitoring the receiving address would see the eventual sale without receiving the purchase signal needed to enter the position at a comparable price.

Coordinated transfers and wash loops

Bitquery also identified 423 creator-linked transfers involving additional signing addresses. In one example involving the UOTF token, four temporary wallets received nearly eight million tokens each before forwarding them to selling addresses in a coordinated transaction.

One recipient subsequently sold its holdings for $1.59 million, producing a large apparent gain without a corresponding recorded market purchase. Such transactions can make concentrated token distributions resemble successful trading activity across several independent wallets.

Bitquery found another complication among the biggest winners. Fifteen of the 25 largest reported gains met its criteria for wash loops, where concentrated buying activity coincided with direct financial links between wallets.

One example involved Arena, where a wallet spent $4,223 before recording approximately $4.92 million in sales. Another address, previously funded by the apparent winner, accounted for 99% of buying activity during the holding period. Bitquery said the seller had transferred more than $1.4 million in SOL to that buyer over the preceding two days.