What we find when we actually measure it

Question. A Create transaction's fee payer is a stable ID, not a real identity — fund a fresh signer per launch and every token reads FIRST_LAUNCH. Does clustering on whoever funded that signer recover the operator?

Finding. Almost never. Across 941 resolved deployers, 85.4% were funded from exchange or infrastructure addresses. Private funders are 14.6%, and four of the 127 distinct ones have now funded more than one deployer — the largest funded eight, which is the first structure this check has surfaced. It stays a weak signal: a single infrastructure address accounts for 151 of the 941, so naive funder clustering would have produced one phantom 151-wallet cabal, and only 58 of the 941 have any outcome sampling at all.

Method. Walked each deployer wallet to its first inbound SOL transfer, then classified the sender as exchange, program-owned infrastructure, or private wallet. Deployers whose own history is too deep to walk return UNKNOWN rather than a guess. Shipped as a live check; it is deliberately silent when the funder carries no signal. n=941 and growing, 11 August 2026 — published at n=15, corrected to n=190 the same day, and corrected again at n=941 when the 'no private funder appears twice' claim was overturned.

Question. How often does a pump.fun token's on-chain `creator` field stop naming who actually deployed it?

Finding. 21% of aged graduations had transferred ownership (8 of 38, median age 47 days), against 0 of 20 fresh graduations. On one, the real deployer had 42 launches while the wallet named by `creator` had none — so a serial launcher read as a first-time creator.

Method. Compared the on-chain `creator` field against the fee payer of each token's actual Create transaction, walking the bonding-curve PDA to its oldest signature and confirming the `Instruction: Create` log before trusting any result. n=38 aged, n=20 fresh, measured 5–6 August 2026.

Question. A set of token alerts had a median peak of +23% and 48% of them reached +25%. Is there an exit rule that converts that into profit?

Finding. No. All 78 tested cells lost money — trailing stops, fixed take-profits, timed exits, delayed arming, and every entry offset — on mean, median, ex-top-5 and in both time halves independently. The reason is upstream of the exit: median forward return from the alert price was negative at every horizon from 30 seconds to 60 minutes, and got worse the longer the hold.

Method. 304 alerts over 10.9 days, costs modelled at 1.72% round trip. The trap is that a PEAK is a maximum over a path, so it is positive by construction even for pure noise, while forward return is a point measurement. Test raw forward return before building any exit grid: if it is negative at every horizon, no exit rule can repair the entry.

Question. Which tools actually detect same-block bundle buys on Solana, and what does each one miss?

Finding. Coverage differs more than the marketing suggests. Bundle detection, holder concentration and deployer history are three separate problems, and most tools solve one well and the others by proxy.

Method. Feature-by-feature comparison against live tokens, with the checks each tool actually performs.

Question. Three tools, three different answers on the same token. Which layer is each one actually measuring?

Finding. They are not competitors so much as different layers: contract safety, wallet-graph visualisation and deployer history answer different questions. Using one as a proxy for another is where people get caught.

Method. Side-by-side on shared tokens, with each tool's own stated methodology.