![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/CAO5P9kWOKKDiuWd63lXr.png\")
<\/figure>\nFour behaviors, one fee<\/h2>\n
Sparsity maps four practices the community was already condemning onto the same revenue logic. Bundled launches, batch-issuance shops, paid calls, and player-versus-player modes all raise the number of trades. Pump.fun takes a cut of each one.<\/p>\n
Bundlers.<\/strong> They work, the review says, because the starting market cap and starting liquidity are set low. A trader can put a small amount of SOL across dozens of wallets, absorb a large share of the supply in the launch block, and sell into ordinary traders. The lower that opening market cap, the cheaper the maneuver \u2014 and that opening parameter is Pump.fun\u2019s.<\/p>\n Batch launchers.<\/strong> Creator fees pay for issuing, not for keeping a token alive. A token that lasts an hour and a token that circulates for a long time both let the creator take 0.30% of every trade. The rational pattern described here is to launch as many as possible, take the early volume, and move on.<\/p>\n The top 25 issuing addresses together launched 761,000 tokens. Fewer than 1% \u201cgraduated\u201d \u2014 the platform\u2019s term for clearing the bonding curve \u2014 yet those addresses made $128 million in total. The single top wallet launched 171,195 tokens, at about $200 of revenue per token on average.<\/p>\n The same shops sometimes produce a hit. Tokens from two of the wallets reached peak market caps of $122 million and $327 million. Sparsity treats those outcomes as side effects. The core income, for the issuers, is still early trading traffic.<\/p>\n Callers.<\/strong> Since August, in the window the review dates from August 12 to November 8, 2026, the platform had paid $29.6 million in call rewards to 51,115 wallets. Distribution was highly uneven: ten wallets took 16% of the entire pool, and the median payout for an ordinary recipient was $13. The top ten wallets averaged about $485,000 each.<\/p>\n Rewards are calculated from the trading volume a call produces. Thin small-cap books are the easiest to move. In August, among the 50 highest-earning callers, 40 were mainly promoting tokens with an average market cap under $100,000. Twelve of them were mainly promoting tokens averaging under $10,000.<\/p>\n The review says Pump.fun had already heard the criticism. On October 10 the platform said later incentives would be tied to followers\u2019 profit and loss, and that the reward weight on small-cap calls would be cut. In the three weeks after that change, the share of rewards earned by the top 20 callers that went to tokens with a median market cap under $100,000 rose from 68% to 94%. The weekly bonus total rose 53%.<\/p>\n The losses, in this accounting, sit with the people who follow. The research team tracked 14 callers. Ten of them were focused on tokens with a median market cap under $100,000, and their followers together lost $926,000 the day after the calls. Only one of the 14 left followers with a small gain, of $10,000. The piece also states that only one of the 14 made followers money, and that the remaining followers\u2019 combined one-day loss was $926,000.<\/p>\n The median path of a called token was up 6% one minute after the post, down 48% after an hour, and down 74% after a day. The median price of every called token was lower the next day. Callers are paid whether the token rises or falls. Sparsity\u2019s explanation for why KOLs keep recommending tokens that lose followers money is that the incentive itself pays for that behavior.<\/p>\n Player versus player.<\/strong> The logic given here is a market without fresh capital, in which experienced traders take from newcomers. The mode is built to fill faster and to raise how often a single user trades. Each fill generates a fee. Pump.fun had already, on June 30, removed one such mode, Tokenized Agent. The platform\u2019s stated reason: too many launch channels had produced a \u201cmalignant player-versus-player ecosystem.\u201d<\/p>\n Run long enough, the review argues, the incentive splits the market. On the demand side, speculative participation in these tokens loses for most people over time; only a very small number of wallets make a substantial return. On the supply side, issuing a token earns with almost no risk attached.<\/p>\n Becoming a supplier is close to costless: one click launches a coin. The arbitrage repertoire described as already mature includes riding the heat of a popular token, faking volume to look active, and buying batches of old wallets to issue from. That repertoire, the piece says, is refined every month.<\/p>\n People who might once have held are turning into issuers. Issuing pays; holding tends to lose. Each new participant who sees that becomes another issuer, dividing a buyer pool that is already shrinking. That, rather than a sudden collective mood, is the review\u2019s account of why a holding consensus collapsed. Long holding became the disadvantaged choice under the rules.<\/p>\n Issuance quality is the visible trace. At the time of the review, Pump.fun\u2019s overall launch count was roughly level with the late-2024 peak. In the fourth quarter of 2024, 3.16 million launches produced 207 tokens with a market cap above $10 million. In the third quarter of 2026, 3.05 million launches produced 24. Weekly new issuance had climbed back above 300,000. The number of hits per 100,000 launches fell from 6.5 to 0.8.<\/p>\n The review accepts one counter-observation as true: bonding-curve volume had been rising since June. Combined bonding-curve and PumpSwap volume, though, had fallen from $25 billion to $30 billion a month in the first quarter of 2026 to $13.8 billion in October. The platform is paid on volume. Buyers are paid, if at all, when a token becomes a hit \u2014 and hit production, set against the 2024 quarter above, was about one-ninth of what it had been.<\/p>\n Survival points the same way. Of 24.4 million cumulative Pump.fun launches, only 312 tokens still had a market cap above $100,000 on the statistics date used in the piece: about one in 78,000, a survival rate of 0.0013%. Sparsity says that rate is lower than on most comparable platforms that issue on a far smaller scale, and describes this as the first market the team has observed in which supply expands quickly while demand keeps decaying. Without the platform incentives feeding it, the review says, the system could not have reached this size.<\/p>\n The system is Pump.fun\u2019s, but the volume that keeps it running comes from traders. The arbitrage only cashes out if someone takes the other side, and the piece says that someone is usually the same public doing the complaining.<\/p>\n The examples are social, not just statistical. People denounce bundlers and then follow the next launch. Someone harvests a popular token and posts in the community praise the technique. Some KOLs call about 20 tokens a day; the audience, in this account, follows for being early to the message, not because followers come out ahead. Of the 14 tracked callers, only one made followers money. The rest of those followers lost $926,000 combined in a day.<\/p>\n Sparsity names two costs. One is the volume itself, from which Pump.fun and creators take fees. The other is attention: later rounds of hype and later call-driven harvests are contests for that attention.<\/p>\n A year before this review, the mainstream approach described in the piece was to find a token early and hold through the swings. By the time of the article, the median called token was down 74% a day later. The traders still around were the ones who sold first. For one person, selling first is rational. If everyone does it, a long run never gets the holders it would need. If nobody holds past the first hour, a token never reaches a market cap in the tens of millions \u2014 and that first hour is where three-quarters of Pump.fun\u2019s revenue comes from.<\/p>\n The following are Sparsity\u2019s suggestions, not a trading recommendation and not a claim that any single habit repairs the incentive.<\/p>\n The piece says people do not need Pump.fun\u2019s permission to adjust: hold a token they actually want, instead of rotating on every move; judge a calling KOL by whether followers make money, not by how often they post; stop circulating front-running and bundled launches as clever strategy; and move activity toward launch platforms that pay for a token lasting, rather than for rapid turnover.<\/p>\n None of those acts, the author writes, directly rewrites the underlying incentive. Each trade that does not enter the extraction loop does reduce fee income.<\/p>\n Sparsity states outright that the authors are not contract engineers, and that what follows is a reform idea, not a buildable specification. The shared aim is to move the moment when revenue is paid away from the first hour after launch.<\/p>\n The sketch raises the opening market cap and pairs it with deeper starting liquidity, with liquidity compounding as volume grows. Fees would go not only to creators but also to holders and liquidity providers, and creator fees would unlock on a schedule tied to how long the token survives. Call rewards would stop being settled on volume. A KOL would be paid according to whether followers were still holding, and still in profit, days later \u2014 not according to how much trading the post produced.<\/p>\n Adjustments of that kind, the review argues, are what would give the meme trading ecology a chance of lasting. It says Pump.fun has the balance sheet to experiment: about $2.84 billion in on-chain assets, and control of the whole issuance path. A market that kept producing meme coins with long lives would, in this view, earn the platform more over time than a model that keeps spending the buyer\u2019s capital. Short-term extraction is chosen because it is more profitable now, and the piece calls that model unsustainable.<\/p>\n Even those changes might not be enough. They would raise costs for issuers and bundle arbitrage, but they would not remove a gap the author treats as structural: the supply side\u2019s tools stay ahead of anything the demand side can match.<\/p>\n Everything above still assumes a bonding curve. The further proposal is to drop that model.<\/p>\n In the sketch, every participant subscribes at the same price. There is no curve, so being early in the block is not a cheaper entry, and sniping loses its edge. The issuer sets a fundraising floor and ceiling. If a fixed window \u2014 24 or 48 hours \u2014 misses the floor, the contract refunds buyers in full, and a failed launch does not cost them. If the raise hits the ceiling, the contract creates a liquidity pool, the LP tokens are burned or locked permanently, and the issuer cannot touch the raised funds. Each wallet is capped, for example at 1% of the raise, so a whale or a bot cannot take most of the supply. The platform charges only when a raise succeeds. A thousand failed raises pay it nothing. The fee moment moves from every trade to every successful fundraise.<\/p>\n Set against the bonding curve, where the earliest buy is the cheapest and suits bundling bots, a single subscription price removes the advantage of buying first. Sparsity says this would also remove bundle sniping, block sniping, and developers pulling liquidity, and would remove the reason to launch dozens of tokens while betting that one of them catches.<\/p>\n The same section lists limits, and presents them as limits. A per-wallet cap is weak against Sybil attacks: old wallets are cheap to buy in bulk, and bundlers can still split funds across many of them. A uniform price does not stop a dump on the first day after listing. It only makes the start fair.<\/p>\n Sparsity\u2019s conclusion is that the meme-coin narrative, in the form it had in November 2026, had run out. Unless the issuance model itself changes \u2014 toward something like earning from a successful raise, rather than from turnover and from tokens going to zero \u2014 the authors do not expect the old ecology to come back. As long as a launch platform can earn from tokens dying and from constant turnover, long holding stays the losing strategy. Something else will show up, they write. It will not be a meme coin of the current kind, and it will not show up quickly.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/f3bX2R3WnN_0GOuGLwdYe.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nMore launches, fewer tokens anyone stays with<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/7VD1QpdLJ4iuOHu0fjpZL.png\")
<\/figure>\nThe audience is also the counterparty<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Qgm8Nw5Vpr-Ji3HFihcwp.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nHolding as the move that no longer fits<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/LwGY05JtkGMoWYpuMrIRj.png\")
<\/figure>\nWhat the review asks participants to change<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/M3YDqSPSNzcdmVaSqtCEJ.png\")
<\/figure>\nA redesign, offered as a sketch<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/9fthTYd1Kr3bSiUeOnCFp.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nLeaving the bonding curve<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Sr1_MYMW9pr06AJUCBoTb.jpg\")
<\/figure>\nWhat the authors think comes next<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/2hjw2Sr-wCWxRyoIcOt00.png\")
<\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/hAe5MDEY5N9SktG8w8aAD.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/coinovel.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/BGy7sIeqnXGivFQ-tsNl1.png\")
<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"