Only 0.76% of pump.fun wallets made $1,000 or more: CN research

In 2024, the Solana blockchain saw a rapid expansion in the memecoin market, with pump.fun at the forefront. The platform captured a huge audience looking for quick profits. Crypto.news conducted an in-depth analysis of the profitability of investing in pump.fun tokens, revealing that while a few early adopters were able to secure profits, the majority of investors eventually lost their money.

Pump.fun is the leader in Solana’s memecoin ecosystem, with a 50% market share. It has achieved this by making token launches quick and easy. It has also focused on ensuring a fair process for creating and trading tokens, avoiding issues like pre-sales or allocation of teams.

Pump.fun works as follows:

• Users choose the meme coin they like.
• They buy the currency through the correlation curve.
• They can sell the currency at any time to either secure a profit or reduce a loss.
• If the token’s market cap reaches $69,000, $12,000 of liquidity will be locked up in Raydium, a decentralized exchange on Solana, and then burned.

Using various queries and scripts inspired by Dune analysts @adam_tehc, @hashed_official, and @evelyn233, we developed our own versions that allowed us to collect data for this article.

Due to its ease of use and rising popularity, around 300,000 tokens have been created on Solana every month since March 2024. However, not all of these tokens have even reached the market cap of $69,000. Over the course of six months, 33,683 tokens have reached Raydium, while a total of 1,883,578 tokens have been deployed on pump.fun. This results in a graduation success rate of only 1.79%.

Statistics for investors on the pump.fun platform paint an even bleaker picture. Of the total 29,601,462 portfolios involved, the majority saw negative results:

• 17,725,908 portfolios (59.9%) recorded negative gains and losses. 89% of these portfolios made losses, which resulted in their negative returns being fixed by selling at a loss.
• On the other hand, 11,126,772 portfolios (37.6%) reported positive net gains and losses, with 98% of them achieving actual gains.

The profit distribution also shows the low odds of winning with memecoin investments. To give a clearer picture of the odds associated with different profit levels on pump.fun, here are some real-world comparisons:

• +$100 profit (6.47% chance): Less likely to be accepted to Harvard as an early applicant (7.8% in 2021).
• +$1000 profit (0.76% chance): Similar to the chance of having twins, which is about 0.4%.
• +$10,000 win (0.046% chance): Less likely than becoming a NASA astronaut (0.055%).
• +$100,000 win (0.0033% chance): Less likely than being struck by lightning in a lifetime (about 0.00653%).
• +$1,000,000 win (0.000540% chance): Similar to the chance of dying from a meteorite strike (about 0.0004%).
• +$10,000,000 win (probability 0.000132%): Similar to the odds of flipping a coin and getting the same side 20 times in a row.

Many individuals are looking for a quick way to turn their financial fortunes around, inspired by stories of random people who made huge profits overnight. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that most of them will lose, often catastrophically. Instead of gambling on unproven tokens, investors should focus on assets like BTC, ETH, and SOL — assets with a proven track record. These assets won’t turn $100 into $1 million tomorrow, but they will steadily and sustainably increase one’s wealth. Ultimately, investing is about making money, not losing it. The sooner one lets go of the dream of instant riches and embraces this reality, the sooner one will start making decisions that will truly increase their net worth. Anything else is a fool’s errand to financial ruin.