Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
meme coins
manipulation
pump and dump
cryptocurrency launchpad
trading signals
Meme Coin Factories: Uncovering Large-Scale Manipulations on pump.fun
🤖 AI Summary
研究针对pump.fun平台上的加密货币大规模操纵行为，通过分析1500万枚币的交易数据，识别出五种主要操纵策略，并提出应对措施。
📝 Abstract
Once complex, creating and deploying a new cryptocurrency has become trivial. Coin launchpads now allow users to generate a new coin with merely a few clicks, at a minimal cost. Launchpad popularity has grown in tandem with the rise of "meme coins," which usually do not offer any novel technological properties and are purely created for fun. The most prominent coin launchpad, pump.fun, has gained significant traction, grossing over 100 million USD in daily trading volume. The mass adoption of coin launchpads, however, also enables strategic actors to easily manipulate trading signals, unbeknownst to inexperienced traders who then buy certain coins, and enable these strategic actors to profit from rapid and unsustainable price increases ("pumps"). To identify such manipulations at scale, we conduct a large-scale study of pump.fun, collecting information on all 15 million coins launched in the last two years, and performing analysis on large, random samples of transaction data. We identify five classes of manipulation strategies: 1) wash trading, 2) creator address obfuscation, 3) coordinated sell, 4) copycat coins, and 5) social media manipulation. We find that strategic actors often bypass the platform interface and implement these strategies in a highly automated and low-latency fashion, by interacting directly with the blockchain. We further uncover the existence of "Market-Manipulation-as-a-service (MMaaS)," third-party tools that enable users to perform these manipulations without any technical expertise. We conclude by devising mitigations and proposing recommendations for traders, pump.fun, wallets or chain scanners, software development platforms, and regulators.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
meme coins
manipulation strategies
Market-Manipulation-as-a-service (MMaaS)
blockchain interaction
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