PIPPIN: Great example of institutional level value extraction.

Jan 5

Have you seen these tokens which pump 20-50x (sometimes even 100x++) before violently crashing and flat lining for months on end, just to do it again or be abandoned forever?

They are handled by professionals, backed by deep pockets.
We aren't talking small ball, pump/dump groups.
These are institutional level, with some reaching up to $100M+ turnover, billions in market cap.

Handlers pay:
KOLs to shill buyers/long positions before big crashes, to extract value from panic sellers and long liquidations.
KOLs to shill sellers/short positions before big pumps, to extract value from FOMO buyers and short liquidations.
exchanges for listings, market makers for liquidity

Meanwhile they cleverly abuse the pump.fun AMM LP curve mechanics, index pricing and monitoring large perp buyers/sellers to hunt liquidations.

Once the game has run it's course, the token's AMM pool is dumped into, drained and the token goes back to marginal value.
Handlers hold on to large amounts of supply, while walking away with profits.

Reality of the pump.fun AMM bonding curve;

You can not sell more value than later buyers inject.
While early sellers drain real value, late sellers hold unrealizable paper gains.

In normal markets, price reflects belief, liquidity, and risk;
manipulation requires capital

In these pump.fun AMM plays, price reflects how far along the curve you are;
manipulation requires timing, not conviction

Early buyers acquire massive supply at minimal cost, while later buyers must pay exponentially more and affect price more than early buyers.

This is not conviction, price discovery or speculation, it’s mechanical value extraction.

The curve is built for this, it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do;
maximize early upside
compress price discovery
transfer value from late participants to early ones

PIPPIN is an interesting project, with a great mind behind it.

The problem is that pump.fun tokens like this are abused and exploited so hard, leaving an immense amount of dead money/bag holders.

It is uncertain to me if even a single one of these tokens will be able to carry value into the long-term.

Jan 5

Trade active

JELLYJELLY → 0.0617 | ATH 0.58 | -89.4%
COAI → 0.421 | ATH 49.00 | -99.1%
GOATSEUS → 0.0439 | ATH 1.37 | -96.8%
MOODENG → 0.0867 | ATH 0.70 | -87.6%
FARTCOIN → 0.395 | ATH 2.74 | -85.6%
SWARMS → 0.0149 | ATH 0.62 | -97.6%
ARC → 0.0480 | ATH 1.12 | -95.7%
TROLL → 0.0355 | ATH 0.28 | -87.3%

Tokens in a similar state to where PIPPIN was before it had it's second wind, also launched with a pump.fun AMM which have listed established perps during/after it's initial pump, and have had a near complete retrace/flatlining.

PIPPIN printed a 0.0123 low, from ATH 0.33 initial pump, -96.3% from ATH

All of these look rugged and dead, just like PIPPIN before it's recent pump.
And they well might be rugged and dead.

Beware there is no guarantee any of these will do the same as PIPPIN.
And even if they do pump, could retrace it all again, into down-only.

My post is meant as an observation, not meant to solicit anyone to participate.
I advise extreme caution trading any pump.fun AMM-based token.

Apr 3

Order cancelled

Pippin reached it's end destination, returning all the way back to 0.035 from 0.90, a complete retrace of it's run, as expected.

Even at 0.05 it was doing 100's of millions USD volume.

In my opinion, VC's should be investigated on their involvement in these type of manipulated instruments, basically using them to farm perp traders/degens, low-cap investors.

Abusing the mechanics of AMM, pulling/adding liquidity into dex pools and monitoring perp trades to extract maximum value.

It's a very enticing game, but any way you cut it, if you play, you will likely be the victim.

May 22

Note

An observation I made is that there seems to be a coordinated effort to keep the price stable while unwinding large short positions.

This has been going on since price went from 0.035 to 0.021

While short positions are closing, somehow seems to unwind without price going up due to spot selling.
Usually you would find serious price increases with the amount of shorts that closed.

I guess the play here is to get a consistent fill on the short position. The spot position likely is not 'on the books' for the cabal trading it, so the profits will have to come from a perp position.

Essentially, spot position is taking the price impact 'losses' to get the profits on the book with the perp position.

While OI sits at 1.21b PIPPIN. 121% of supply
30% of that was short positions, down to 15% over the last two weeks.
at the peak that's 300M+ PIPPIN of shorts, with over 100M PIPPIN shorts closing, there is still 200M+ PIPPIN open shorts.