Editing Sniping

**Sniping** is buying a token in the first blocks after it launches or gains liquidity, usually with automated sniper bots, to acquire supply at the lowest price before other buyers arrive.[^1][^2] It is common in the [[Trenches|trenches]].

## How it works
Sniper bots watch for new tokens or new [[Liquidity pool|liquidity pools]] and buy at once.[^1] On [[Solana]], bots commonly send transactions as [[Jito]] bundles: up to five transactions executed in order and all-or-nothing within one slot, ranked by a SOL tip.[^3] In March 2024 Jito Labs suspended its public mempool after a rise in sandwich attacks on users.[^4] On a [[Bonding curve]] the first buyers get the lowest prices. Luo et al. found sniper bots in the majority of meme coin projects they studied, typically exiting once copy traders follow them in.[^2]

## History
Cernera et al. described sniper bots as "a new kind of trader bot" on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain and detected them in [[Rug pull|rug-pull]] operations up to March 2022.[^1]

## Examples
- [[Mother Iggy]]: about 20% of supply was sniped at launch in 2024; [[Iggy Azalea]] said she did not know about it, and [[Bubblemaps]] said sniping on that scale requires a leaked contract address.[^5]
- [[Hawk Tuah]]: The Defiant reported that a wallet cluster held about 96% of HAWK's supply bought at its December 2024 launch; the team said it had tried to stop snipers with high fees at the start of trading on [[Meteora]].[^6]
- [[Melania Meme]]: Bubblemaps said a wallet that sniped the MELANIA launch on 19 January 2025 made $2.4 million and later funded the wallet that created [[Libra]].[^7]
- [[Official Trump]]: Bubblemaps alleged that pseudonymous trader Naseem turned about $1.09 million, split across at least nine wallets, into about $109 million by sniping TRUMP; it said it could not prove he controlled the wallets, and he denied insider trading.[^8]

## Criticism
Snipers that are funded by or tied to a token's creators are hard to tell apart from independent traders, so heavy launch sniping is read as a sign of insider allocation, as in the MELANIA and Mother Iggy cases.[^7][^5] See also [[Bundling]].

## Timeline
- 2024-03: Jito Labs suspends its public mempool[^4]
- 2025-01-19: MELANIA launch sniped by a wallet later linked to LIBRA, per Bubblemaps[^7]

## See also
- [[Glossary of trenching terms]]
- [[List of memecoin traders]]
- [[Mint authority]]
- [[Copy trading]]
- [[KOL]]
- [[Community takeover]]
- [[Pump and dump]]
- [[Honeypot]]

## References
1. [Token Spammers, Rug Pulls, and SniperBots: An Analysis of the Ecosystem of Tokens in Ethereum and in the Binance Smart Chain (BNB)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08202), arXiv (USENIX Security 2023), 2022-06-16
2. [Resisting Manipulative Bots in Meme Coin Copy Trading: A Multi-Agent Approach with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08641), arXiv (WWW '26), 2026-01-13
3. [Low Latency Transaction Send](https://docs.jito.wtf/lowlatencytxnsend/), Jito Labs, n.d.
4. [Solana client Jito Labs axes mempool function following increase in MEV attacks](https://www.theblock.co/post/281504/solana-client-jito-labs-axes-mempool-function-following-increase-in-mev-attacks), The Block, 2024-03-09
5. [SCENE's 2024 Story of the Year: The Boom—and Bust—of Celebrity Meme Coins](https://decrypt.co/298703/scene-2024-story-of-the-year-celebrity-meme-coins), Decrypt, 2024-12-26
6. [Hawk Tuah Girl's Memecoin Crash Sparks Insider Trading Accusations](https://thedefiant.io/news/markets/hawk-tuah-girl-s-memecoin-crash-sparks-insider-trading-accusations), The Defiant, 2024-12
7. [LIBRA token likely tied to MELANIA memecoin creators: Bubblemaps](https://cointelegraph.com/news/libra-token-likely-tied-melania-memecoins-bubblemaps), Cointelegraph, 2025-02
8. [Crypto analytics platform Bubblemaps claims one trader turned $1 million into $109 million trading Trump memecoin](https://www.theblock.co/post/341664/crypto-analytics-platform-bubblemaps-claims-one-trader-turned-1-million-into-109-million-trading-trump-memecoin), The Block, 2025-02