Bubblemaps traces most of a pump.fun influencer's alleged $125K to callout rewards

By Bubblemaps' calculations, about $80,000 of the estimate came from callout rewards and about $45,000 from trading profits ^[9][10]. The trading profits are the money made by buying ahead of each call and selling into the buying that followed ^[10]. Rewards are 64% of the total and the trades 36% ^[18]. Over 49 calls, the rewards come to roughly $1,633 a promotion and the trades to about $918 ^[19][16].

Timing only matters for the trading slice. Bubblemaps found that linked wallets bought each token shortly before it was promoted and typically began selling about three minutes after the post went live ^[3][7]. On pump.fun, tokens launch quickly and one post from an account with a large following can move a thinly traded price, Crypto Briefing noted ^[12]. Anyone buying on the callout "may be arriving after the profitable part of the trade has already happened," the outlet wrote ^[15]. That puts a price on front-running a callout, or rather on the insider's side of it: under a thousand dollars a call ^[16]. Even the full $125,000, spread across the account's roughly 88,000 followers, is about $1.42 a head ^[20].

The $45,000 is what the linked wallets made ^[10]. Followers' losses on the same tokens would be a separate total, set by when each of them bought and sold. The insider's profit tells you how big the head start was. It does not tell you what the audience paid for it.

We think the money in this case was in the promotion, and the front-running was the smaller side trade ^[9][10]. The counter-case starts with the wallets. Bubblemaps' trading figure covers the wallets it tied to the account, and any it missed would add to the $45,000 without changing the rewards ^[10]. The case also depends on those links holding. If the wallets are not the influencer's, the $45,000 is someone else's profit. Bubblemaps describes the activity as ongoing ^[5], and at the estimate's average of about $2,551 a call, each further callout adds to a total counted at one date ^[17].

Our view is wrong if a fuller wallet map pushes trading profit past the $80,000 in rewards ^[9].