Memecoin and speculative token trading

The claim

“made $16,740 trading memecoins today

took some time off but I’m back”

@treysocial, 3 October 2026, 9,544 views¹. The tweet goes on; we quote its opening lines.

A memecoin is a crypto token with no product or income behind it. The scheme is to buy new coins early and sell at several times the price. Most of the coins in these tweets start on a launchpad, a website where anyone can create a token in a minute; the largest is Pump.fun. Three of our 8 tweets state a result; none gives the money put in, the losing trades, the fees paid or a checkable wallet address¹. We read only the stored text; images, videos or threads may show more¹. This page judges the scheme, not the people who tweeted.

The sums

A trading profit is a stake times a multiple, minus fees, minus the losing trades. Working backwards from $16,740, before fees: a coin that doubled needs a $16,740 stake, and one that went up 30x needs $577 (our sums).

Pump.fun charges 1.25% of every buy and every sell while a coin is small². Trading terminals, websites for buying in one click, charge about 1% on top³⁴. So buying and later selling a small coin costs a newcomer about 4.4% through a terminal, or about 2.5% through Pump.fun’s own app (our estimates)²³.

Take ten buy-and-sell pairs a day for 30 days on $500 positions through a terminal (our assumptions). That is $150,000 bought and about $6,700 in fees, so the trades must gain about $7,700 before fees to keep $1,000 (our estimate)²³. A few large bets held for days cost far less¹.

What happens to most people who try

CoinGecko, a crypto data company, counted every wallet that sold a coin on Pump.fun or PumpSwap, its exchange, each month from April 2024 to April 2026⁶. A wallet is an account, not a person.

Through late 2025, in most months most wallets lost money; the profitable share rarely passed 50%⁶. April 2026 was the best month on record: 73.28% of wallets showed a profit, but 65.14% made $1 to $500 and 5.37% made over $1,000, about 1 wallet in 19 (our sum)⁶. CoinGecko counts only coins that were sold, and says this “understates losses”⁶.

A later count is much less favourable, and we could not reconcile the two. Over 90 days, 19,003 of 304,161 Solana memecoin traders were in profit, 6.25% (our sum), and the median trader lost $120, as reported in August 2026 by Cryptopolitan, a crypto news site⁶¹.

The upside

Real winners exist. The Kolscan figures below were read on its pages, not re-added by us.

• Big days. Kolscan, a public leaderboard of well-known traders, is owned by Pump.fun⁶⁰. On 10 October 2026 its top 50 wallets took $1,232 to $17,832 for the day; the middle of the 50 was $3,128 (our calculation)³⁶. So “$16,740 today” is about the single best daily result there: possible, but not typical even for tracked traders³⁶.
• Strong months. The two strongest of six top wallets we opened showed realised gains (on coins already sold) of $312,613 and $133,791 in 30 days³⁷. The one topping the daily board showed minus $19,947, or close to flat counting coins still held³⁷. These six top one day’s board and are not an average.
• Lifetime winners. By January 2025, 294 Pump.fun wallets had taken over $1 million each and 55,012 over $10,000, or 0.4% of wallets, on a count reported by Decrypt⁷. Pump.fun’s co-founder replied that the true share is likely much larger; the article reports no figures behind that⁷.
• One trade. One wallet bought $16.20 of a coin and sold for about $3 million; Decrypt, which reported it, describes it as luck³⁹.

For a careful newcomer, a small loss is the usual result and a good result is a gain under $500 (our estimate)⁶⁶¹.

What it takes to compete

• Capital and volume. The six top wallets above traded $1.2 million to $4.2 million in a month; the middle one kept about 1% of that (our sum)³⁷.
• A stomach for losing trades. With a seventh we opened, they won 15.3% to 52.7% of their trades³⁷. A few large wins carry the result.
• Speed. The typical Solana memecoin was held for about 100 seconds, on a Galaxy Research count reported by Cointelegraph¹³. A person clicking by hand is trading against software.

The cost is the fees above plus the stake, all of which can be lost. To tell early: record every trade after fees and judge a few hundred, not the best day. Take out your three best trades; if the rest is a steady loss, the result rests on luck⁴³.

Who else makes money from it

These are paid whether the trader wins or not.

• The platforms. Traders paid about $244 million in fees in 30 days at Pump.fun’s two products and five trading tools, on all blockchains (about $217 million on Solana); the platforms kept about $100 million (our sums from DefiLlama, a data site)⁹.
• Referrers. Axiom, a trading terminal, pays 30% of its net fee on trades by people you refer²⁴.