The Dark Forest of MEME Coin: Industrialized harvesting lines earn millions a day, but retail investors have difficulty finding gold with a retention rate of one in ten thousand

Author: Frank, PANews

11 tokens were issued in 3 days, with a 100% winning rate and a profit of $25,000. This may be the ideal self of countless MEME players. But the reality is that this is just one of the thousands of addresses of the industrialized RUG team. While retail investors are still rushing to pursue the "thousand-fold myth", professional teams have used robots, multi-signature contracts and public opinion engines to transform the MEME track into a 24-hour harvesting machine. On-chain data shows that this type of industrialized RUG operation is not an isolated case.

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

A single address made $25,000 in 3 days, and hundreds of addresses formed the RUG pipeline

PANews used on-chain data to dissect the entire harvesting chain and tried to reveal a cruel reality: when the issuance of MEME coins became a mathematical probability game, and when "community consensus" was mass-forged by industrialized water armies, the end of this carnival may have been doomed.

Taking this address as an example, FrRqEYFfJ3VEHodfiZdrPnM3vAHTm2u9ewBN6HR9RxZE (hereinafter referred to as "FrRqE") issued 11 MEMEs in the past three days, with a total profit of US$25,000 and a winning rate of 100%.

How is it achieved specifically? From the perspective of holding time, the time interval between each purchase and sale of FrRqE is only tens of seconds, and the longest time is no more than 1 minute. First, FrRqE will buy a large amount of the token after the market opens, usually about 48 SOL, so that other users will think that the token is bought by a big investor, so they will quickly follow suit and buy it. At this time, FrRq's holdings have exceeded 70%. Then he will sell these tokens at once within tens of seconds. The average rate of return is about 20%~30%, and the profit each time is about 2,500 US dollars.

Of course, since various monitoring tools are now very complete, when developers hold too large a proportion of positions, many experienced old players will not buy in blindly.

Therefore, FrRq will quickly disperse these tokens to 400 wallet addresses after buying them in one fell swoop to evade the monitoring of the on-chain robots. When more and more addresses buy and the amount in the Pump pool is about to be full, FrRq will repeat the same trick and transfer all the tokens back to the same address, and then sell them all at once, instantly reducing the tokens to zero.

Interestingly, the source of funds in this address seems to be deliberately hiding something. After hundreds of penetrations on the chain, PANews finally found that the funds of this address originally came from the OKX exchange, and the initial address for receiving funds was 3SrXcoKQ97xwFAwELnraHtpuycjGvmG82E9SBGs6UcQd.

Judging from the operation time, this address has been carrying out such activities for more than 2 months. Every time an address issues about 10 tokens, it will transfer the funds to a new address to continue the next round of RUG. Currently, there are already hundreds of RUG addresses derived.

Of course, in addition to these on-chain actions, there is more to be done to complete RUG’s DEV. For example, these tokens in the Pump market usually have dozens or hundreds of replies, and in the early stages, it was obvious that a large number of robots were buying. From the transaction volume and discussion, users feel that this project is like a normal MEME token.

What is even more terrifying is that such tokens were not discovered by PANews through special screening, but were discovered by chance by randomly clicking on tokens on Pump.fun. For users who frequently participate in MEME investment, they should often encounter similar RUG situations.

The operation process of this kind of RUG bureau is not something that ordinary users can achieve. First, professional address distribution tools and collection addresses are needed to complete flexible and unified token transfer operations. Second, tools are needed to monitor social media hot spots in real time to ensure that every token issuance is also on the latest hot spots. Third, a large number of Pump.fun water army and social media water army are also needed, such as the @r999d999z X account, which was created in January 2025 and has promoted FrRqE's tokens many times. There seems to be a close connection between the two. Fourth, a dedicated trading robot responsible for creating momentum and sending packaged transactions. To complete the above steps, perhaps a strong technical team and operation team are really needed to achieve it.

With a retention rate of one in ten thousand, there is no place for retail investors in the MEME forest

According to data from dexscreener, among the tokens issued on Pump.fun in the past six months, the number of tokens with a market value of more than $50,000 is 1,987, of which 27 have been issued for more than one month. 72 have been issued for more than one day, and the remaining 1,915 have been issued in the past 24 hours. Six of them were issued yesterday. According to this ratio, a total of 49,153 tokens were issued on Pump.fun on February 13, with a graduation rate of 1.23%, and a total of 606 tokens graduated. The proportion of tokens that can maintain a market value of more than $50,000 within one day after graduation is 0.9%. From the overall numerical point of view, the probability of maintaining a market value of $50,000 one day after being issued on pump.fun is about one in ten thousand.

We use the six tokens that were still in existence after the issuance on February 13 as research samples to see what characteristics these surviving tokens have (during the observation process, such data samples dropped from 6 to 4).

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

Second, the LP lock-up ratio of these tokens is very high, basically above 95%, and the lock-up amount is above $100,000. Third, the number of followers on social media is above 2,000. Although several accounts were not created long ago, their social media scores are not low due to the interaction with KOLs.

In general, the era of PVP seems to have passed. It is almost impossible for tokens issued by individuals to go viral or reach a high market value in this market. Many players who have issued tokens may have known this for a long time. In this context, DEVs that still choose to issue a large number of tokens every day obviously have their own unique business philosophy. And this dark forest-style gameplay is still in an unregulated environment.

A large number of players are reluctant to leave the market

The MEME coin track is changing from a casino where everyone is looking for angles to a hunting ground for technology and main forces against ordinary retail investors. It may be difficult for users to see the routines of RUGs sometimes, but as the actual losses gradually expand, more and more users are reluctantly withdrawing from this dark forest.

According to The Block, the trading volume of Pump.fun tokens on Solana has cooled down recently, with the average daily trading volume in the past week being only US$560 million, a new low since Christmas 2024, a sharp drop of 82% from the single-day high of US$3.13 billion three weeks ago.

The data on the Solana chain also shows a similar trend. In the past three months, the number of active wallets on the Solana chain reached 7.22 million on November 16, and fell to 3.18 million on February 1. The largest drop was more than half. Aggregators such as Meteora and Jupiter, which were popular due to the TRUMP token some time ago, also saw a rapid decline in active users after the heat cooled.

Even many KOLs whose main business is MEME claim that the current environment is no longer suitable for "dougou". A blogger named Laughing said: "I have completely given up betting on the opening pvp of memes. Those who buy lottery tickets will never be able to beat those who sell lottery tickets."

Arjun Balaji, a researcher at Paradigm, put it bluntly, “Memecoins were once fun and pure, but industrial trench warfare turned a harmless PvP game into a predatory game dominated by insider advantages.”

Although the market is becoming increasingly severe, we may still be able to get some inspiration from the two sides of the blockchain. On the one hand, the lack of supervision of the blockchain has led to the recklessness of malicious DEVs. On the other hand, it is precisely because of the traceability of the blockchain that no matter how the opponent hides, we can always find some clues from the chain. For players who concentrate on research, after being familiar with these malicious routines, they can also avoid similar scams.

In addition, although the token retention rate of Pump.fun has been as low as one in ten thousand, players may also avoid searching for a needle in a haystack in the earliest stage, but choose to let the bullet fly for a while, focusing on the tokens that have been issued for more than one day and are still "alive". Time seems to be becoming the most practical screening tool. For those teams that hope to issue project tokens through MEME, because of such a market environment, sincerity becomes a simple and effective narrative. Bad money is destroying the market, and good money will hit bad money hard.