A single wallet launched 79 tokens on BNB Chain over 28 days, generating $6.04 billion in reported trading volume through a network of thousands of closely connected wallets, according to a new on-chain investigation by blockchain analytics firm Bitquery. The research found that only about $15,000 in volume came from wallets that traded five or fewer tokens in the series, suggesting that the overwhelming majority of activity did not represent broad participation by independent traders.
The investigation, published on October 29, examined activity from September 30 through October 29. Across the token series, Bitquery recorded 489,727 trades, identified 5,502 wallets that each traded at least 51 of the tokens, and traced repeated token launches, liquidity locks, automated trading and subsequent large-scale token sales to a common wallet.
Bitquery’s findings suggest a coordinated operation designed to create the appearance of active token markets before selling newly minted supplies into decentralized-exchange pools. However, the reported $6.04 billion represents cumulative trading volume, not stolen money or investor losses. The investigation also does not establish the real-world identity of the wallet controller or prove criminal intent. The full findings are detailed in Bitquery’s original on-chain investigation.
One Wallet Connected 79 Token Launches in 28 Days
The investigation began with a wallet associated with the sale of an unofficial Anthropic-themed token that generated more than $100 million in reported volume before collapsing. Tracing the wallet’s transactions led researchers to 78 additional tokens displaying the same distinctive deployment pattern.
All 79 token contract addresses ended in 7777. Each token was deployed through a newly funded wallet that received its initial funding from the central wallet shortly before deployment. Bitquery also found that the deployments it examined used identical gas settings, consistent with repeated use of the same deployment process.
The operation’s recurring sequence involved creating a token, establishing a trading pool on PancakeSwap, locking the pool’s liquidity-provider tokens through PinkSale, and generating substantial trading activity. The central wallet subsequently minted large quantities of additional tokens and sold them into the pools.
By October 29, Bitquery had identified 76 tokens that had undergone the reported mint-and-dump sequence. The median interval between a token’s first trade and its dump was approximately eight hours, with the shortest interval around 24 minutes and the longest approximately 30 hours. PREDICT was still trading when researchers examined the series, although its subsequent status was not established in the report.
The scale of the operation was not limited to a handful of launches. Bitquery recorded a median reported trading volume of $67.9 million per token, while BABAB generated approximately $295.9 million on October 14. The largest individual examples demonstrate how quickly a newly created asset can accumulate substantial headline activity without equivalent evidence of independent demand.
5,502 Wallets Generated Nearly All the Reported Volume
The most significant finding concerns the distribution of trading activity. Bitquery grouped wallets according to how many of the 79 tokens they traded. A cluster of 5,502 wallets had traded at least 51 tokens each, accounting for 489,058 trades and approximately $6.04 billion in volume.
By contrast, 411 wallets that traded five or fewer tokens generated a combined $15,018 in reported volume. The remaining wallets contributed only negligible additional turnover in the researcher’s breakdown.
This concentration suggests that the apparent participation across the token series was largely generated by a recurring network rather than a succession of independent markets attracting new buyers.
Bitquery also traced the sampled wallets’ trading activity to a single smart contract used to execute their trades. The central wallet supplied the funds for purchases, while the bot wallets acquired tokens and subsequently sold them back into the pools. The resulting stablecoin proceeds returned to the central wallet, allowing capital to circulate repeatedly and generate additional recorded volume.
The research therefore identifies a potential weakness in relying on wallet counts and transaction totals as measures of investor participation. Thousands of addresses may appear to represent a broad trading community, but common funding sources, shared execution infrastructure and repeated participation across the same token series can reveal a much more concentrated underlying structure.
Locked Liquidity Did Not Prevent the Token Dumps
One of the investigation’s most important technical findings concerns the use of liquidity locks. Bitquery identified 75 transfers of liquidity-provider tokens to PinkSale’s PinkLock contract, generally within approximately two minutes of the corresponding pool’s creation.
Such locks can prevent a liquidity provider from withdrawing the paired assets by removing its liquidity position. They do not necessarily prevent a token’s owner from minting additional units if the smart contract retains that permission.
The distinction became apparent in the second ANT token examined by Bitquery. The token launched with a supply of 500,000 units, but its contract allowed the owner to mint additional tokens. After approximately 13 hours of trading, the central wallet transferred roughly 71.3 billion ANT into the pool in a single transaction, receiving approximately $1.36 million in USDT as the token’s price collapsed.
The pool had been generating between approximately $8.7 million and $9.6 million in hourly trading volume during the preceding full hours. Its reported volume reached around $124 million before the final sell. Those figures did not demonstrate that an equivalent amount of independent capital had entered the market.
Across the 76 identified dumps, Bitquery calculated approximately $74.3 million in USDT proceeds. The researchers cautioned that most of this represented the operation’s own capital returning after being cycled through the pools, rather than money extracted from unrelated investors. The central wallet’s measured net position was approximately $779,643, excluding certain costs and assets outside the calculation.
Why the Findings Matter for Crypto Investors
The central issue is the difference between trading activity and genuine market demand. Reported volume can influence token rankings, attract speculative buyers and create the impression that an asset has a deep market. When the same capital repeatedly circulates among connected wallets, those signals become much less reliable.
This is not an isolated concern in decentralized finance. Dave Finances previously examined suspected wash trading across 438 Raydium pools, where repeated transactions also generated enormous headline volume without equivalent evidence of independent capital entering the market.
A separate investigation into bot clusters generating most of Avalanche DEX volume found that concentrated automated activity could dominate a blockchain’s reported trading statistics. These cases differ in their mechanics, but they raise a common question: how much of a market’s measured activity reflects independent participation rather than a small number of coordinated or automated strategies?
The BNB Chain findings also highlight why liquidity locks should not be treated as comprehensive security guarantees. A locked liquidity position may reduce the risk of a conventional liquidity withdrawal, but it does not establish that the token supply is fixed, that the contract’s minting permissions are safe or that the market’s trading activity is genuine.
Investors assessing newly launched tokens therefore need to consider several separate factors: whether the contract permits additional minting, who controls those permissions, how the largest wallets are funded, whether trading is concentrated among recurring addresses, and how much independently supplied capital supports the pool. The broader problem of rapidly disappearing liquidity has also appeared in research into Meteora liquidity pools drained on Solana.
Repeated token launches can also make the process more difficult to detect. Dave Finances previously covered an investigation alleging a repeated rug-pull pattern across 53 Robinhood Chain token launches, illustrating how similar launch mechanics can recur across multiple assets. In both cases, the strongest conclusions come from tracing funding, transaction patterns and wallet relationships rather than relying on token names or headline trading statistics.
Bitquery’s findings do not establish who controlled the BNB Chain operation or whether every connected wallet had the same owner. Nor do they prove that every participant in the wider network acted with fraudulent intent. What they do show is that a large reported volume figure can coexist with very little trading activity from wallets outside a highly concentrated group.
The next question is whether similar deployment and trading patterns can be identified across other tokens and decentralized exchanges. Until independent participation, token-supply controls and actual pool liquidity are assessed separately, reported volume and locked liquidity alone provide an incomplete picture of a newly launched cryptocurrency’s market quality.
Johan Shamshad is a financial markets writer at Dave Finances covering cryptocurrencies, trading platforms, brokers, fintech, financial regulation, and developments across global markets. He previously worked at Gulf News, adding newsroom experience to his coverage of fast-moving financial and digital-asset markets.
His work focuses on identifying market-moving events, company developments, regulatory changes, product launches, and shifts in trading and financial infrastructure.
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