Pump.fun’s record ICO flooded by coordinated wallet participation

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On July 12, the pump.fun ICO sold out in 12 minutes, raising over $500 million onchain and an additional $100 million via centralized exchange partners. The ICO attracted over 10,000 wallets with a median buy-in of $537, according to Blockworks Research data. 

Quite a big win for Pump, especially considering that we are long past the days of sell-out ICOs being the norm.

But underneath the ICO’s record-breaking demand, some interesting anomalies emerged.

One wallet (88888FAoqY6JdSvz7fk1FPd6qjPTcCMGcS64GbwonLoE) funded 500 different addresses, each with $400 in USDC and 0.05 SOL for gas, according to data compiled by Blockworks researchers. 

These wallets all participated in the ICO, purchasing $200,000 in PUMP tokens before fees. One wallet appears to have utilized centralized exchanges to create the illusion of being many wallets. It’s an impressive feat, given that KYC checks were required to purchase PUMP.

Onchain data shows the wallet’s activity in sequence: Withdraw stablecoins from Bybit and Binance, distribute them evenly to 500 wallets, send a bit of SOL to cover gas fees and have each wallet contribute exactly $400 to the ICO.

Researcher Sharples notes that these wallets show up under the “unknown address” category in Blockworks Research’s funding source chart, skewing the optics of distribution.

Blockworks’ Dan Smith tracked the wallet’s history and found that the actor previously used the same network of addresses to spoof holder counts in low-float memecoins like ARTIC and WUKONG.

Nine months ago, these wallets were dusted with 0.000000001 tokens to inflate “unique holder” metrics. ARTIC later rugged. It’s worth noting that the use of older wallets may help bypass anti-Sybil heuristics that flag recently funded/created addresses.

Some have suggested that the orchestrator may have been speculating on future airdrops or bonuses for small buyers. By splitting a $200k allocation into hundreds of sub-$500 entries, the whale could appear to be 500 unique participants — each potentially eligible for future rewards from pump.fun or third-party protocols.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that pump.fun had any involvement in the behavior of this currently anonymous whale. Once tokens are live, it’s pretty impossible to control how wallets participate.

What is clear, however, is that without strong Sybil resistance, sophisticated actors can game even well-structured launches using fragmented wallets and coordinated funding strategies to dominate allocation, spoof demand and manipulate downstream incentives.

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