We published a new paper: What Makes a Memecoin? It tests whether the traits shared by the biggest Pump.fun memecoins actually set them apart from every other launch.
What the study is
Most "what winning memecoins have in common" lists only look at winners. That can't tell you whether a trait helped, because ordinary launches might have it too. So we compared the winners with everyone else.
Every Pump.fun launch is a public on-chain event, so we could draw an unbiased random sample of all launches. We took 1,000 random windows of Solana activity from January 2024 to October 2026, which gave 4,523 random launches and 868 random graduations. We compared those with 1,309 tokens that peaked above $1M, using on-chain launch data, token images and websites, social links and narrative labels.
Most interesting findings
About 1 in 4,200 launches reached a $1M peak. Out of roughly 23.9 million launches, about 1 in 87 graduated off the bonding curve. The $1M figure rests on 18 random graduates and moves between 0.9 and 5.0 per 10,000 depending on how a peak is measured.
What winners have in common, almost every launch has. 97.6% of the large tokens had a creator buy at launch, and so did 96% of all launches. None of the six traits shared by most winners is even twice as common among them.
Some "winning" traits are really just timing. A Telegram link looks 2.33 times as common among winners. Compared with launches from the same months, it's 0.96, meaning no difference. Most top tokens launched in late 2024, when Telegram links were common.
Bundled launches were more common among winners. Signs of coordinated buying at launch appeared in 6.7% of top tokens against 4.7% of all launches (odds ratio 2.0), mostly after the move to PumpSwap.
A richer launch page helps a token graduate, not grow. Each extra signal (an X link, Telegram, a website, a longer description) raised the odds of graduating by about 1.6 times, but didn't help graduates reach $10M. Copycat tokens did worse.
You can't predict the big winners at launch. Launch-time features predict whether a $1M token reaches $10M about as well as a coin flip. 94% of top tokens now trade below a tenth of their peak.
Limitations
This covers one launchpad on one chain. The $1M base rate rests on 18 events. Bundling is inferred from on-chain patterns, not directly observed. None of this is trading advice.
Read the paper
The full paper is free to read and download at somewhere.systems/research/pumpfun. It includes all eight pre-registered hypotheses (three of which failed), the robustness checks, and a 2.5-minute narrated video.