Bitquery Finds 81% of Meteora Pools Drained as Solana Bots Dominate Trading

The findings form part of three on-chain investigations released by blockchain analytics firm Bitquery, with data verified on October 10, 2026. Together, the reports reveal how automated trading, rapidly disappearing liquidity and artificial transaction volumes have reshaped activity across Solana’s decentralized exchanges.

In separate analyses, Bitquery identified 6.85 million sandwich attacks that extracted $29.7 million before costs and found that automated wallets accounted for between 66% and 77% of monthly decentralized-exchange swaps despite representing only 1% to 3% of trading wallets.

The studies raise questions about how much of Solana’s reported activity reflects genuine investor demand, particularly in the speculative memecoin market.

More Than 818,000 Meteora Liquidity Pools Were Drained

In its investigation of Meteora liquidity pools, Bitquery examined 1,015,687 DAMM v2 pools created between October 30, 2025, and July 5, 2026, representing approximately 4,100 new pools per day.

Researchers found that 818,094 pools, equivalent to 81% of the total, were drained to less than 1% of their previous SOL liquidity. Around 715,137 pools, or 70% of all pools created, were drained within their first hour.

The median time between pool creation and draining was seven minutes.

Of the pools examined, 57% originated from token-launch graduations, where liquidity raised during an initial token sale moved automatically into a decentralized trading pool. In some arrangements, developers retained control over the resulting liquidity positions and could withdraw funds immediately after trading began.

Bitquery identified 586 wallets that each drained at least 100 pools. Collectively, these wallets accounted for approximately one-quarter of all drained pools, while the most active individual wallet drained 5,111.

The investigation also uncovered extensive activity involving wallets financially connected to developers. In sampled pools opened between November and February, approximately 97% of buyers’ net contributions came from wallets linked to the developers through funding or subsequent transfers.

That proportion fell to 71% from March onward, when more unconnected wallets began participating.

Estimated Buyer Losses Reach $630 Million

Bitquery estimates that buyers with no detectable financial connection to pool developers contributed approximately 6.7 million SOL more to drained pools than they recovered, equivalent to roughly $630 million using the prices applied in its research.

About 81% of those estimated losses occurred in pools opened from March onward.

The estimate was extrapolated from a stratified sample of 393 drained pools, rather than calculated by independently verifying every buyer’s identity. Bitquery reported a 90% uncertainty range of approximately 4.4 million to 9.2 million SOL.

Importantly, the figure should not be interpreted as $630 million stolen exclusively from ordinary retail investors.

Researchers found that wallets exhibiting automated trading behavior accounted for 92% of the estimated losses in the sampled unconnected-buyer group. Some could be independent trading bots attempting to profit from new token launches, while others might have undiscovered relationships with developers.

The blockchain records do not establish who ultimately controls every wallet.

Separately, Bitquery identified 18,449 pools where repeated buying and selling within individual transactions generated approximately $1.1 trillion in recorded trading volume, often without meaningful changes in net capital exposure.

Some of the largest examples used flash loans, allowing the same capital to circulate through a pool repeatedly within a single transaction.

Solana Sandwich Bots Extracted $29.7 Million

A second Bitquery investigation identified 6,850,144 sandwich attacks between October 30, 2025, and October 7, 2026, involving 2,545 attacking bot wallets and approximately 2.15 million targeted wallets.

Sandwich attacks occur when an automated trader buys a token before another market participant’s transaction, temporarily pushes up the price, and sells after the targeted transaction executes.

Bitquery estimated that these attacks generated 309,010 SOL, equivalent to $29.7 million in gross extraction before fees, network expenses and transaction tips.

Approximately 96% of identified attacks involved tokens traded through Pump.fun’s launch curve or PumpSwap.

The daily attack rate increased from approximately 3,400 in late 2025 to 51,900 during September 2026, a fifteenfold increase. Bitquery also found that 39% of the gross extraction came from trades involving other bots rather than wallets classified as ordinary traders.

Slippage tolerance emerged as a significant vulnerability. Among Jupiter-routed transactions involving Pump.fun tokens, swaps permitting price movements of 20% to 50% were sandwiched approximately fourteen times as often as comparable swaps allowing less than 3% slippage.

The $29.7 million figure is separate from the Meteora loss estimate and should not simply be added to it as an independent measure of total investor losses.

Just 1% to 3% of Solana Traders Generate Most Swaps

Bitquery’s third investigation examined monthly wallet participation across Solana decentralized exchanges between November 2025 and September 2026.

Researchers estimated that between 4.6 million and 10.2 million wallets per month displayed trading behavior consistent with human users. However, those addresses represented an upper-bound proxy rather than a verified count of individual people.

Despite accounting for only 1% to 3% of monthly trading wallets, automated accounts generated between 66% and 77% of recorded swaps.

Another striking finding involved trading volume. Across the 11-month dataset, 79% of measured decentralized-exchange dollar volume consisted of same-transaction round trips, where tokens were bought and sold back within a single transaction.

Not every such transaction represents fraudulent trading. Arbitrage strategies can involve legitimate circular transactions that align prices across different markets.

Nevertheless, the concentration complicates attempts to interpret headline DEX turnover as evidence of widespread investor activity.

Bitquery also found that only 11% of newly observed people-like wallets returned to trade the following month, suggesting that much of the apparent user growth was not translating into consistent participation.

Solana’s Trading Boom Has a Liquidity Quality Problem

The three investigations point to a problem that cryptocurrency investors have increasingly struggled to measure: a blockchain can process enormous amounts of trading while the amount of independent capital supporting that activity remains much smaller.

Solana’s low transaction costs make it attractive for legitimate market making, arbitrage and algorithmic execution. Those same economics also allow speculative token issuers to create large numbers of wallets, generate repeated transactions and build impressive-looking trading histories without attracting comparable amounts of outside investment.

Similar concerns emerged in Dave Finances’ earlier coverage of automated trading concentration on Avalanche, where two bot clusters generated 65% of decentralized-exchange volume during an eight-day period.

These figures do not make automated trading inherently illegitimate. Arbitrage bots can improve price consistency, while automated market makers can provide useful liquidity.

The critical distinction is whether activity supports genuine market access or simply manufactures the appearance of investor interest.

For memecoin buyers, that difference can determine whether a profitable-looking position is actually sellable.

Why High Trading Volume Cannot Guarantee an Exit

Consider a newly launched token showing thousands of buyers, rapid turnover and a steadily rising price.

Those signals would normally suggest growing demand. But if many buyers are controlled by the developer, the same funds are moving repeatedly between wallets, and one address retains the right to withdraw most of the pool’s SOL, the market is considerably more fragile than its trading chart suggests.

Even a small genuine investment can become difficult to recover when the supporting liquidity disappears.

That is different from a technical exploit such as the recent EtherVista liquidity-pool attack, where a smart-contract arithmetic flaw allowed assets to be extracted. Meteora’s findings primarily concern how participants exercised liquidity control and traded around pools, rather than establishing a protocol-wide coding vulnerability.

The difference matters when evaluating responsibility and potential remedies. A faulty contract may require an engineering fix. A market where developers legitimately control withdrawable liquidity may instead require stronger investor screening, better disclosure and changes to token-launch incentives.

What the Findings Mean for Investors and Solana

For retail traders, Bitquery’s research offers three particularly useful risk indicators: who controls a new token’s liquidity, whether early trading comes from financially connected wallets, and how much price movement a swap permits before execution fails.

None provides complete protection. A locked liquidity position may reduce one withdrawal risk without eliminating concentrated token ownership, while tighter slippage settings cannot prevent every adverse trade or sudden market collapse.

The broader lesson is that liquidity itself deserves as much scrutiny as price.

That became clear in the recent collapse of Dominion’s Solana tokenized-silver project, where a treasury compromise and subsequent selling overwhelmed available liquidity and ultimately contributed to the project’s closure.

For Solana’s ecosystem, the next meaningful indicators may be less glamorous than record transaction counts. Retained users, independently funded wallets, executable liquidity and trading volumes adjusted for circular transactions could provide a more reliable picture of economic adoption.

There is also an opportunity for trading platforms to compete on execution quality, clearer liquidity controls and more transparent warnings around concentrated ownership and suspicious early activity.

Bitquery’s reports do not prove that Solana’s wider economy is dominated by fraud, nor do they establish that every drained pool was malicious. They do show that headline wallet counts and trading volumes can conceal substantial differences between automated activity and genuine investor participation.

For traders navigating Solana’s memecoin market, the most important question may no longer be how many wallets are buying a token, but how many independent participants are behind those wallets and whether sufficient liquidity will still exist when they want to sell.