Sniper
 Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki | |
| part of speech | noun, verb form snipe |
|---|---|
| scene | Solana trenches, pump.fun launches |
A trader or bot that buys a token in the first instants of its launch, before manual buyers can react.
A sniper is a trader, or more commonly an automated bot, that buys a token in the first instants of its launch, before manual buyers can react. The act is called sniping, and a token bought this way is said to have been sniped. On Solana, where blocks arrive roughly every 400 milliseconds, sniping is a machine speed game: bots monitor the chain for new token creations and liquidity events and submit buys within milliseconds.
Mechanics
Sniper bots watch launchpads such as pump.fun and decentralized exchanges for pool creation, then race to land a buy as early as possible on the bonding curve, where tokens are cheapest. Popular retail sniping tools have included Trojan, BullX, Photon, and GMGN, many of them operated through Telegram. Professional snipers use custom infrastructure, priority fees, and Jito bundles for favorable placement. Creators counter snipers by launching with a bundle, which fills the earliest block with their own wallets, and snipers in turn evolve to detect stealth launches. Some snipers are believed to be linked to the dev or to an insider group with advance knowledge of the launch time, in which case sniping shades into insider allocation.
Usage
On crypto Twitter, "sniped" is usually a complaint: a launch whose early supply went to bots is considered compromised, because sniper wallets tend to sell into the first wave of organic demand, making later buyers exit liquidity. Analytics dashboards report sniper counts and sniper holdings for new tokens, and a high figure is a standard red flag in a rug check, alongside bundled supply.
History
Launch sniping existed on Ethereum decentralized exchanges during the 2020 and 2021 DeFi cycles, but usage of the term exploded with the Solana meme coin boom of 2024, when pump.fun standardized launches and made the first block predictable enough to industrialize. By 2025 sniping, copy trading, and wallet tracking had merged into single retail trading terminals.