Pump.fun’s 79% first-day dropout rate fuels memecoin trader fatigue

Nearly eight in 10 Pump.fun tokens have stopped trading after their first day, according to a study, while traders have complained about too many new coins and too few reasons to hold them.

Summary

• Bitquery found 79% of Pump.fun tokens traded only on launch day.
• Just 17.2% of September launches recorded a trade at least 24 hours later, Jumpbit reported.
• MemeFees counted at least 21,765 launches across eight platforms on Oct. 19.
• Traders complained about instant selling and fewer reasons to hold new tokens.

Bitquery, the blockchain data provider behind the finding, tracked new Solana tokens from Nov. 1, 2025, through Oct. 7, 2026. Its survival table recorded 8,984,141 Pump.fun tokens, with just 1.5% registering any trade during their fifth week and 0.2% recording at least 10 trades in that window.

Traders describing the market often complain about short holding periods, rapid selling, and a loss of the community appeal that once drew them to new coins.

Memecoin survival has remained low across launchpads

Beyond Pump.fun, Bitquery recorded launch-day-only trading for 51% of Meteora Dynamic Bonding Curve tokens and 84% of Raydium LaunchLab tokens. Only 1.9% of Meteora tokens and 1.3% of Raydium tokens were still trading in their fifth week. The study counts successful swaps, including automated trades, and discloses missing blocks and gaps involving newer trade formats.

A separate September report from Jumpbit examined 1,083,771 Pump.fun launches using dydt's Solana trade index, following activity through Oct. 12. The research counted roughly 36,100 launches per day, with 95.1% recording at least one trade.

Jumpbit found that 17.2% had a last recorded trade at least 24 hours after launch, while 7.5% had one at least seven days later. Only 0.5% of the September launches traded during the final 24 hours of its observation period.

Under Jumpbit's definition, a token qualifies as still trading if its last recorded transaction has occurred beyond the specified age. A creator's first purchase counts, and continued activity can occur even when a token's price is close to zero, per its methodology.

Daily launch counts have gaps in coverage

MemeFees recorded at least 21,765 launches across eight tracked platforms on Oct. 19. Flap.sh accounted for 10,570, followed by at least 9,284 on Pump.fun and 1,707 on Pons.

Its seven-day daily averages stood at 17,726 for Pump.fun, 11,325 for Flap.sh and 1,578 for Pons. Its Pump.fun observations also carry a plus sign because incomplete collection windows make those figures lower bounds.

Using factory-contract events, MemeFees labels its Flap.sh and Pons counts as exact for the contracts covered. Several competitors, including Meteora DBC and Raydium LaunchLab, appear only as samples and are excluded from the totals and rankings.

A Sep. 5 account of Pons's launchpad activity described more than 10,000 daily deployments and $4 billion in cumulative platform volume. The historical report put the creator share at near 70% of its 1% trading fee, with creators receiving over $25 million cumulatively at that point.

DEXTools published a smaller June 29 report covering 215 fresh Pump.fun pools. Its researchers classified 24% as showing a bot-like burst, defined as at least 20 trades within 15 minutes. The provider explicitly described the measure as a heuristic, not confirmed identification of automated wallets.

The sample measured the proportion of tokens crossing an activity threshold, without calculating what share of dollar trading volume came from bots. DEXTools recorded a median of three trades per token in that snapshot, while 30% had no recorded trades.

Trader complaints have centered on holding incentives

One trader, identified as Mystral on X, described an environment where developers expect immediate volume and buyers expect immediate returns.

"we don't have a shortage of coins, we have a shortage of reasons to hold them," the trader wrote.

In a separate X post, Mystral said memecoins were losing "the feeling that a random community could turn something completely stupid into a billion dollar phenomenon."

Bishaqs, another trader, described launchpad trading as a market for attention in which early buyers sell to later arrivals.

memecoins are a casino where the chips are your early twenties. that's the whole product and it works exactly as designed there's nothing underneath them, so stop waiting for billions. on pumpfun roughly 1 in 70 coins even makes it off the bonding curve, attention lasts about as... --- Bishaqs (@Bishaqs) October 20, 2026

As previously reported by crypto.news on Oct. 18, CoinGecko placed the memecoin category near $29.9 billion, including approximately $12.4 billion for Dogecoin and $1.6 billion for Pepe.

Early trading activity has varied between tokens

An Oct. 6 account of new memecoin launches recorded different opening trajectories for Meme Agency and PunchCard, both on Solana.

Meme Agency launched through Pump.fun on Oct. 4 and graduated that day. DexBrief figures cited in the account showed 5,390 holders, 8,070 active traders, and nearly 14,000 transactions within roughly a day, with trading volume near $965,400.

PunchCard began trading on Oct. 1. Solflare data cited in the same account put its price as high as $0.00019527 early on Oct. 2, before it traded near $0.000045 on Oct. 6, when its market capitalization stood around $43,900.

Jumpbit's September study classified 116,714 launches, or 10.8%, as graduated because they had a PumpSwap pool.