Benjamin Horn · Prometheus7
Our first read said three funding sources sat behind 39% of pump.fun launches. That number was wrong. Finding out why turned up something stranger, and a smaller, more useful truth.
Correction, 31 Oct 2026: an earlier version of this page published the 39% figure and described the largest sources as operators. Several of them are exchange-size or program-held wallets, so this page replaces it.
We built a live verifier that reads every pump.fun launch directly from the chain. In a little over a day it recorded 26,068 launches from 7,986 dev wallets. Of the 24,177 that settled, 338 bonded (1.4%). In 77%, the dev dumped within 15 minutes or the coin never got going.
To find who was behind them, we followed the money: each dev wallet back to the wallet that first funded it. We traced 12,883 launches that way.
The top of the list looked explosive. One wallet alone sat behind thousands of launches. So we asked how much it had taken out.
6tckHFBpiJ8YgYN8FUskvtvTpXQZ55g5LHeo1kvELoDQ funded 19 dev wallets behind more than 3,600 launches. It holds about 13,000 SOL, roughly $1.26M.
We sampled 200 of its transactions. It signed none of them.
Every one ran through a single program, dahPEoZGXfyV58JqqH85okdHmpN8U2q8owgPUXSCPxe. The instructions are called InitTransfer and FinalizeTransferSol, which is the language of a bridge. The payments in came from 99 different wallets, and the payments out went to 54 different wallets. Only 2 of those 54 launched a coin we saw.
So the 13,000 SOL is not anyone's winnings. It is money sitting in a program's vault, passing through for many people. We have not confirmed which service it is.
The dev wallets it funded are a different story. We read the complete history of the ten busiest.
Each of those 20 wallets has exactly two transactions: SOL in from the dev, SOL out to the same vault. The money comes out of the bridge, passes through a launcher, and goes straight back in.
Ten wallets behaving this alike looks like one script or one product. It does not prove one person. We do not know why the SOL takes this route.
Not what we expected. Those ten wallets took in about 29 SOL from anywhere other than the vault, and spent about 23 launching. That leaves at most about 6 SOL, around $580, on 3,207 launches.
That covers only what reached those wallets. Fees sent elsewhere, other wallets trading these coins, and whatever sits on the far side of the bridge are all outside this count. But the 13,000 SOL headline is simply not there.
Then we checked the other top sources. Several hold sums no launch operator needs: 204,000 SOL, 193,000, 101,000, 95,000. They were moving slowly enough to pass our exchange filter, which only tested speed.
These are almost certainly exchanges and custody wallets. Withdrawing from one tells you nothing about the people doing it.
We redid the count, removing every source holding 1,000 SOL or more. That took out 66 sources behind 48.4% of everything we had traced.
So 39% was really 9%. It is still concentrated, since 24 sources out of 2,370 sit behind 29.5% of launches. But it is not three wallets running the market.
Some of the operators held up, and they are easy to see once the exchanges are gone.
EndJzwh6… funded 193 dev wallets for exactly 193 launches. It holds under 10 SOL. None of its 174 settled coins bonded.
Across the 16 sources that use a fresh wallet for nearly every coin, that is 688 devs, 722 launches, and 6 bonded out of 620 settled.
On a launch feed, each of those is a brand-new dev with a clean record. Check the dev and you learn nothing. Check who paid the dev and it is the 193rd coin from the same money.
Here is the part that survived, and improved. We replayed the launches using only what was known before each one, for devs who bought their own coin.
When the funding source had a record of dumping, the dev dumped 67.9% of the time, against 39.7% for everyone else. Those coins bonded 1.3% of the time, against 5.2%. That covers 545 flagged launches and 3,794 others.
With only the fastest hubs removed, it reads 65.4% against 40.2%. Removing the exchanges made the signal cleaner, because an exchange's record was never one operator's record.
Our verifier had the same flaw, so it could mark a dev as a rug risk over who else used their exchange. That is fixed.
Launch counts and money turned out to be different things. We added up about 23 hours of Solana trades, using roughly the first 50 trades of each coin.
The launch spam carries almost no money: the 6tck… coins saw about 104 SOL of recorded buying. The visible gains went to about a thousand fast wallets, not to one mastermind.
This is not final profit and loss. Later sells are not in the count, and about 30,000 SOL was still sitting in positions at the end of the recorded trades.
Check the money, not the wallet. A clean dev is exactly what rotation produces. And when a funder is an exchange, that tells you nothing either way.
Every wallet here is public. Paste any coin into the live board to see its dev, its funder and that source's record.
This is a reading of public chain data, not a buy or sell call. Dollar figures use SOL at about $97.