Bitquery, a company that indexes blockchain data, says 818,094 of the 1,015,687 trading pools opened on Meteora’s DAMM v2 design between 30 Oct 2025 and 5 Jul 2026 were later drained. It published the investigation on Saturday.
Meteora is a so-called decentralised exchange on Solana, a set of programs that runs on the blockchain with no company approving listings. Anyone can open a pool there, a pot of a new coin and SOL, Solana’s own token, that other traders buy from and sell into. Whoever deposits the money can take it out again.
Bitquery counts a pool as drained when a transaction leaves it with less than 1% of the SOL it held a moment earlier. By that rule 81% were drained, and 70% of all pools were drained within an hour of opening. The median pool took seven minutes.
A small group did much of it. Bitquery says 586 wallets drained 100 pools or more each, together 25% of the drained total, and the busiest drained 5,111. Bitquery says they are not one big crew.
Many of the buyers were tied to the coins’ creators. In pools it sampled from November to February, 97% of the money buyers put in came from wallets funded by, or paying back to, the coin’s own wallets. From March the share fell to 71%, and more of the money came from outside, much of it from trading bots.
Bitquery puts the outside loss at about 6.7 million SOL, roughly $630 million. That is a scaled-up estimate from 393 sampled pools, with a 90% range of 4.4 million to 9.2 million SOL. The firm says part of it may be the creators’ own money.
Bitquery also warns that “a drained pool is not by itself proof of fraud”. It says Meteora and the lending service Jupiter are named because their programs ran the pools, launch sales and flash loans, which says nothing about the conduct of those projects, and that they did not open, fund or empty the pools. We found no Meteora statement on the report.
Fake volume, and what we could check
Bitquery’s second finding concerns trading volume. It counts 18,449 pools in which wallets bought and sold a coin back within a single transaction, showing 13.2 billion SOL, about $1.1 trillion, of trading. Most of it, 71%, came in the single week from 6 April, mainly in pools named Vanguard. In one transaction Bitquery checked, the creator of a Vanguard pool took a flash loan, a loan taken and repaid inside one transaction, from Jupiter Lend, bought from its own pool, sold straight back and repaid.
We could check two transactions the report cites. On Solana’s public RPC, a server that answers queries about the chain, the drain of a coin called egglon on 15 Nov 2025 at 03:37 UTC moved 91.4 SOL out of one account and into another in one transaction, as Bitquery says. The Vanguard round-trip trade of 8 Apr 2026 changed its wallet’s balance only by the 0.0000075 SOL fee. We did not check the loan inside it.
The statistics themselves cannot be reproduced without Bitquery’s archive. Bitquery sells Solana data, and its figures stop on 5 Jul. It says its archive misses about 1.6% of blocks.
Meteora’s own public data are consistent with a thin market. They showed 1,623,756 pools in total at 19:54 UTC and $60.8 million of value locked across them, an average of about $37 a pool, although a few large pools lift that figure. The report notes that the LIBRA token launched there in February 2025.
SOL traded at $110.36 as of 19:54 UTC, up 1.6% in 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. This week’s Chain Check has the wider Solana picture, and LAPTOP’s launch post-mortem covers another Solana memecoin launch.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.