Prevalence of Market Manipulation on Other Token-Launchpad Platforms

Investigate the prevalence of market manipulation strategies analogous to those identified on pump.fun across competing token-launchpad platforms that use similar web interfaces and on-chain implementations.

Background

The paper documents five manipulation strategies on pump.fun: wash trading, creator-address obfuscation, coordinated selling, copycat coins, and social-media manipulation, together with Market-Manipulation-as-a-Service tools. The authors note that competing launchpads use similar interfaces and blockchain implementations, suggesting that these strategies may also occur elsewhere. However, the study analyzes only pump.fun and does not determine how prevalent the corresponding manipulations are on other platforms; the authors explicitly defer that investigation to future work.

References

As other competitors follow similar web interfaces and on-chain implementations, we believe most of the manipulation strategies here are also applicable to them. We leave the investigation of such manipulations' prevalence on other platforms to future work.

— Meme Coin Factories: Uncovering Large-Scale Manipulations on pump.fun  (2609.10246 - Szwajcok et al., 9 Sep 2026) in Section 6, Discussion and Conclusion