How do memecoin insiders like snipers and bundlers make money off later buyers?

"The mass adoption of coin launchpads, however, also enables strategic actors to easily manipulate trading signals, unbeknownst to inexperienced traders who then buy certain coins, and enable these strategic actors to profit from rapid and unsustainable price increases ("pumps")."

"We find that strategic actors often bypass the platform interface and implement these strategies in a highly automated and low-latency fashion, by interacting directly with the blockchain."

"We identify five classes of manipulation strategies: 1) wash trading, 2) creator address obfuscation, 3) coordinated sell, 4) copycat coins, and 5) social media manipulation."

"Our results show that sending stock spams has generated significant increase in returns on the 1st day followed by a significant decrease during the next days."

"with rug pulls particularly leaving investors with worthless"

"Memecoins have also been used in “rug pulls,” where the developers of the memecoin abandon a project after raising assets, leaving purchasers of the memecoin with nearly worthless assets."

"Investors, having reacted favourably to requests of the spammer the 1st day, realize that these messages to which they responded positively are wrong information. Hence, they liquidate all their securities."

"such as pump and dump, wash trading or spoofing schemes."

"Lookonchain originally reported the activity on X on Jan. 19, flagging four wallets as belonging to the same "insider" of the re..."

"Blockchain data flagged by Lookonchain shows a trader bought roughly 66.3 million ZREAL tokens early, then sold about 10 million for $210,000, and held the rest, with an estimated $417,000 in unrealized gains."

"Devs who buy their own coin at launch from a bundle of wallets, and sniper bots that buy in the first second, sell into the crowd that comes after them. On coins launched from late October 2025 to June 2026, devs' bundles made at least $579 million and snipers $31.5 million ."

"After CZ announced the name of his dog, this sniper sniped almost every meme coin named Broccoli. Then he distributed Broccoli to multiple wallets for selling using disperse [...] In the end, this sniper earned a total of 27.8M $USDT,"

"Onchain activity indicates the wallets executed hundreds of market sell orders over roughly 10 hours, behavior commonly associated with memecoin "snipers" who enter trades before public launches."

"A sniper made $27.8M by sniping the memecoin named after CZ's dog (Broccoli)!"

"Memecoin insiders, typically called "snipers," are often told about a project before it goes live. This allows them to get in early via a bot before the wider public, then sell on exchanges when prices rise to make quick profits."

"Gains went to a few: the best 1% of buyers took 56% of all the money won, and sandwich bots trading around them came out ahead in every launch week."

"For context, this is not a sniper but Broccoli dev. In total, he made >$50M."

"Some of the traders’ wallet addresses are associated with the developers of some Broccoli memecoins"

"A Solidus Labs report in May last year claimed that 98% of tokens issued on Pump.fun were fraudulent, a claim the platform vehemently denied"

"Buying in the first minute helped a little: 34% of those coins were sold at a profit, against 28% for coins bought a day after launch."

"Memecoins have also been used in “rug pulls”, where the developers of the memecoin abandon a project after raising assets, leaving purchasers of the memecoin with nearly worthless assets."

"Memecoins are also commonly the subject of other forms of market manipulation, such as pump and dump, wash trading or spoofing schemes."