Nearly 50% of Pump.fun Traders Lost Money in March 2026

In March 2026, data from Pump.fun revealed that nearly half of its traders ended the month with losses, highlighting the challenges many faced in the recent Solana memecoin craze.

Key Takeaways

Approximately 49% to 50.6% of wallets on Pump.fun lost money in March 2026.
About 96% of all wallets either ended the month in losses or made less than $500 in profit.
Most traders experienced meager gains, with only 4% achieving profits over $500.
A new policy was introduced to lock creator fee changes, aiming to reduce manipulation.

Nearly half of Pump.fun traders lost money in March 2026

Overview of Trading Losses on Pump.fun

According to a popular Dune Analytics dashboard shared on X by the pseudonymous analyst @oladee, nearly half of the traders utilizing the Solana memecoin launchpad Pump.fun incurred losses by the end of March 2026. This analysis tracked around 1.4 million wallets engaged in trades of Pump.fun-issued tokens, revealing that between 49% and 50.6% of these wallets finished the month in the red. The remaining wallets mostly managed just modest gains of under $500.

When aggregated, the data indicates that roughly 96% of all wallets either ended with losses or secured profits below $500, highlighting the limited success many retail traders experienced during the memecoin frenzy of March.

Out of the wallets tracked, 45.4% to 45.6% reported profits capped at about $500, leaving only 4% of the participants achieving gains that exceeded this level. Notably, @oladee’s dashboard revealed that only two wallets realized more than $1 million in profit during the month, while a select few accounts reported six-figure losses. This situation underscores the “lottery ticket” nature of trading on Pump.fun. “Over 50% of Pump.fun traders ended this month in losses… when you combine wallets that lost money with those that made under $500, the figure reaches approximately 96% of all participants,” a summary from the data asserts.

Criticism and Economic Design Changes

The large percentage of losses prompted renewed scrutiny of Pump.fun's economic structure, which diverts significant fees to both token creators and the platform while most traders lose money. In response to these concerns, Pump.fun announced on March 24 that it would implement restrictions on creator fee changes. From that point onward, creators can only make a single adjustment to fee distributions after a token's launch, after which these settings will be permanently locked on-chain.

Co-founder Alon Cohen explained in a post on X that this update aims to prevent manipulation where creators change beneficiary wallets after a token gains popularity among traders.

This policy change comes in light of Pump.fun’s status as one of Solana’s most active trading venues, with daily trading volumes previously exceeding $2 billion as meme tokens surged in early 2026. The platform also recently expanded its offerings beyond just meme coins, enabling in-app trading for assets like WBTC, USDC, and Ethereum through Wormhole, and introducing a “Trader Cashback” system to allocate more fee revenue back to active users.

Despite these developments, the data shows that approximately 96% of March’s wallets either lost money or earned less than $500, turning this latest analysis into a cautionary tale for retail investors participating in memecoin speculation on Pump.fun and similar platforms.

Previously, in a crypto.news article, Pump.fun's broadened asset trading approach and the introduction of fee cashback were described as efforts to redirect incentives toward more sustainable trading activities, especially as the volatility of memecoins puts retail traders' risk appetite to the test.