The Dark Forest of MEME Coins: Retail Miner Difficulty in the Face of a 0.1% Survivability Rate

Original Article Title: "The Dark Forest of MEME Coins: Industrialized Harvesting Pipeline with Million-Dollar Daily Revenue, Facing the Gold Rush Difficulty of Retail Investors with a Retention Rate of One in Ten Thousand"

Original Article Author: Frank, PANews

Issuing 11 tokens in 3 days, with a 100% success rate and $25,000 in profit. This may be the dream scenario for countless MEME players. However, the reality is that this is just one of the many addresses of an industrialized RUG team. While retail investors are still pursuing the "thousand-fold myth," professional teams have already transformed the MEME race track into a 24/7 harvesting machine using bots, multi-signature contracts, and sentiment engines. On-chain data shows that this type of industrialized RUG operation is not uncommon.

From fund tracing to exchanges from the initial address, to the hundreds of associated wallets derived from it, a "dark game" orchestrated by technology, capital, and human greed is devouring the wallets of speculators.

Single Address Earns $25,000 in 3 Days, RUG Pipeline Comprised of Hundreds of Addresses

PANews used on-chain data to dissect the entire harvesting process and attempted to reveal a harsh reality: when the issuance of MEME coins descends into a game of mathematical probability, when "community consensus" is mass-forged by industrialized shills, the endgame of this frenzy may have already been predetermined.

Using this address as an example, FrRqEYFfJ3VEHodfiZdrPnM3vAHTm2u9ewBN6HR9RxZE (hereinafter referred to as "FrRqE") issued 11 MEMEs in nearly 3 days, with a total profit of $25,000 and a 100% success rate.

How was this achieved? Looking at the holding time, each time FrRqE made a buy and sell, the time interval was only a few tens of seconds, with the longest not exceeding 1 minute. Firstly, FrRqE would buy a large amount of the token after the opening, usually around 48 SOL, making it appear to other users on the order book that a whale has entered the token, causing them to quickly follow suit. By this point, FrRqE's holding has exceeded 70%. Then, within a few tens of seconds, he would sell these tokens in one go. The average return rate per trade is about 20% to 30%, with each profit being around $2500.

Of course, as monitoring tools are now very sophisticated, many experienced players will not blindly buy when the developer's holdings are too large.

Therefore, after a single buy-in, FrRqE would quickly disperse these tokens to 400 wallet addresses to evade on-chain bot surveillance. And as more addresses buy in and the amount in the Pump internal pool is about to hit the limit, FrRqE would repeat the process, sending all tokens back to the same address, then sell them all at once, instantly reducing the token balance to zero.

Interestingly, the source of funds for this address seems to want to intentionally conceal something. After conducting hundreds of on-chain penetrations, PANews finally discovered that the funds in this address originally came from the OKX exchange, with the initial receiving address being 3SrXcoKQ97xwFAwELnraHtpuycjGvmG82E9SBGs6UcQd.

From the operation timeline, it can be seen that this address has been engaged in such activities for over 2 months. Every time an address issues around 10 tokens, the funds are then transferred to a new address to continue the next round of RUG, resulting in hundreds of derivative RUG addresses at present.

Of course, besides these on-chain actions, there is much more that the DEV wanting to complete the RUG must do. For example, these tokens that are pumped internally usually have dozens or even hundreds of replies, and in the early stages, one can still clearly see traces of a large number of bot buys. Both the trading volume and level of discussion make users feel like this project is a typical MEME token.

What is even more frightening is that such tokens are not deliberately discovered by PANews through screening but are accidentally found on the board by randomly clicking on tokens on Pump.fun. For users who frequently invest in MEME, they should often encounter similar RUG schemes.

The operation process of these RUG schemes is not something that an ordinary user can achieve. First, professional address distribution tools and consolidation addresses are needed to complete flexible yet unified token transfer operations. Second, real-time monitoring tools for social media hotspots are needed to ensure that every token issuance is timed with the latest trends. Third, a large number of Pump.fun shills and social media shills are required, such as the X account @r999d999z, created in January 2025, which has promoted FrRqE's token many times, suggesting a complex web of connections between the two. Fourth, dedicated trading bots responsible for building momentum and sending batch transactions. To complete the above steps, perhaps a strong technical and operations team is truly needed.

One in a Thousand Retention Rate, MEME Forest No Longer Welcomes Retail Investors

According to dexscreener's data, in the past six months, among the tokens issued on Pump.fun, the current number of tokens with a market cap still above $50,000 is 1987, with 27 tokens remaining issued for over 1 month. There are 72 tokens issued for over 1 day, and the remaining 1915 were issued in the last 24 hours. Six tokens were issued yesterday. Based on this calculation, on February 13th, there were a total of 49,153 tokens issued on Pump.fun, with a graduation rate of 1.23%, totaling 606 graduating tokens. The proportion of tokens that can still maintain a market value above $50,000 within 1 day after graduation is 0.9%. Looking at the overall values, the probability of a token issued on pump.fun being able to maintain a market value above $50,000 one day after issuance is approximately one in a thousand.

We took the 6 tokens that remained after the February 13 issuance as a research sample to see what characteristics these surviving tokens possess (during the observation process, the data sample decreased from 6 to 4).

Looking at these four tokens, we can summarize several characteristics. First, all these tokens are backed by project tokens or have a clear endorser. Three of them are AI-related project teams, and 1 is a personal token issued by an internet celebrity. Among them, there is no trace of tokens randomly issued by ordinary players.

Second, the LP lockup ratio of these tokens is very high, mostly above 95%, and the lockup amount is above $100,000. Third, the number of followers on social media is all above 2,000, although several account creation times are not long, but due to KOL interaction, their social media scores are also not low.

Overall, the era of PVP seems to have passed, and personally issued tokens in this market are almost unlikely to stand out or achieve a high market value. Many players with issuance experience may have long been aware of this. Against this background, developers who still choose to release a large number of tokens daily obviously have their own unique business strategies. And this dark forest-style gameplay still exists in an unregulated environment.

Fishing in Muddy Waters, Many Players Are Painfully Exiting

The MEME coin race is transitioning from a nationwide angle-seeking casino to a hunting ground where technology and the mainstream target retail investors. Perhaps users sometimes find it difficult to see through the scammers' routines, but as the actual losses gradually increase, more and more users are reluctantly exiting this dark forest.

According to The Block, the trading volume of the Pump.fun token on Solana has recently cooled down, with the average daily trading volume over the past week being only $560 million, hitting a new low since Christmas 2024, a significant 82% drop from the peak of $3.13 billion three weeks ago.

Data on Solana's chain similarly shows a similar trend. In the past three months, on November 16, the number of active wallets on Solana's chain reached 7.22 million, dropping to 3.18 million on February 1, a decrease of more than half. The momentum also quickly declined for aggregators such as Meteora and Jupiter, which had previously surged in popularity due to the TRUMP token.

Even many KOLs whose main business is MEME have claimed that the current environment is no longer suitable for "meme farming." A blogger named Laughing said, "I have completely given up participating in the meme lottery PvP; those who buy lottery tickets can never outplay those who sell lottery tickets".

Arjun Balaji, a researcher at Paradigm, pointed out incisively, "Memecoins used to be fun and pure, but industrialized trenches have turned a harmless PvP game into a predatory game dominated by insider advantage."

Although the market is becoming increasingly harsh, we may still be able to gain some insights from the dual nature of blockchain. On the one hand, due to the unregulated nature of blockchain, it has allowed malicious devs to act recklessly. On the other hand, it is precisely because of the traceability of the blockchain that, no matter how opponents hide, we can always find some clues on the chain. For players who are dedicated to research, once they are familiar with these malicious schemes, they can also avoid similar scams.

In addition, although Pump.fun's token retention rate has dropped to one in ten thousand, players may also choose to bypass the early-stage frenzy and instead focus on tokens that have been issued for more than one day and are still "alive and kicking." Time seems to be the most practical filtering tool. For teams expecting to issue project tokens through MEME, because of this market environment, sincerity has become a simple and effective narrative; bad coins are destroying the market, while good coins will decisively defeat bad coins.

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