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Sniping

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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.

How it works[edit]

Sniper bots watch for new tokens or new 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[edit]

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 operations up to March 2022.[1]

Examples[edit]

  • 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[edit]

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[edit]

  • 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[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ Token Spammers, Rug Pulls, and SniperBots: An Analysis of the Ecosystem of Tokens in Ethereum and in the Binance Smart Chain (BNB), 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, arXiv (WWW '26), 2026-01-13
  3. ^ Low Latency Transaction Send, Jito Labs, n.d.
  4. ^ 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, Decrypt, 2024-12-26
  6. ^ Hawk Tuah Girl's Memecoin Crash Sparks Insider Trading Accusations, The Defiant, 2024-12
  7. ^ LIBRA token likely tied to MELANIA memecoin creators: Bubblemaps, Cointelegraph, 2025-02
  8. ^ Crypto analytics platform Bubblemaps claims one trader turned $1 million into $109 million trading Trump memecoin, The Block, 2025-02
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