On StonkFun's new pairs, the first minutes belong to a bot fleet

When StonkFun adds a new pair, a token you can launch coins against, @LaunchOnSF posts it: "You can now launch coins paired with $NFLX". We checked the first hour of six new pairs on-chain, from 28 to 30 September. On five of them, coins were already launched and being sold before the post went up.

The order was the same each time. The new token's pool against SOL opens on Solana. Within 13 to 81 seconds, coins paired with it start launching. Between a minute and a half and four minutes after the pool opens, @LaunchOnSF announces the pair. Only Nokia's $NOK, the first pair we covered, had no coins before the post.

One trade shows how fast it goes. At 10:54:43 AM ET on 29 September, 13 seconds after the main RKLB pool opened, wallet 6nU2…QCy4 launched its own RKLB-paired coin, ROCKETINU, buying in with 28.5 RKLB (about 20 SOL). Within seven seconds it had sold in 12 pieces for 75.2 RKLB, about $3,300 more than it paid at 1 October prices. StonkFun announced RKLB at 10:56:02, more than a minute after that wallet was done.

That wallet is one of about 20 that keep turning up. We found them by matching the earliest launchers on each new pair: one wallet launched early coins on five pairs, another on four, a third on three. In the first hour after each pool opened, these 20 wallets sold more of each new token than they bought: about $175,000 across five pairs at 1 October prices (table below). About two-thirds of it came before StonkFun's post: most of it on four pairs, while on NFLX most came in the ten minutes after. Ten minutes after each post, they were nearly finished.

Who's on the other side? Not mainly people who saw the post. Before each announcement, between about 800 and 2,900 other wallets were already trading these coins: other bots, sniper tools and fast traders. As a group, everyone outside the fleet put more into these coins in the first hour than they took out, on all five pairs.

This isn't evidence that anyone knew in advance. Every early coin came after the new token's pool was already public on-chain. The gap itself has an ordinary explanation: a platform sets up the pool and makes sure launches work before it announces. But a bot watching the chain sees the pool minutes before anyone sees the post. We found no SOL transfers from StonkFun's three known wallets (its reward-tax, creator and treasury wallets, from our reward-tax report) to any of the 20, from July through 1 October. The dollar figures are net flows, not profit: they leave out fees and coins still held.

What it means if you trade new pairs: by the time the announcement reaches you, the first minutes, the ones these wallets play for, are over. Coins launched in them are often already being sold. It's not a race anyone can win from the announcement.