How to snipe on pump.fun and four.meme

How to snipe on pump.fun: what buying a new pair involves

A snipe is a market buy placed at the moment liquidity appears, usually through a bot rather than a wallet interface. The tools in our set that document new-pair sniping are GMGN, Photon, Banana Gun and Sigma, and several others document it as part of a broader terminal: Maestro, Trojan, Bloom, BONKbot, Axiom, o1.exchange and Based Bot.

pump.fun itself now runs a terminal: Terminal, formerly Padre, acquired by pump.fun in October 2025. Its sign-in page advertises up to 35% cashback without publishing the fee the cashback applies to, and its fee rate, custody model and referral terms are not published at all. It still shows $5.3M in trailing 30-day fees on DefiLlama, so it is heavily used despite the missing documentation.

The migration moment matters as much as the launch. Axiom documents pump.fun migration tools and migration actions alongside its launch tools, which is what you want if you intend to trade a token as it leaves the launchpad rather than only at its first seconds.

Step 1 — fix the settings before the launch, not during it

Slippage is the setting that decides whether your order fills and at what price. GMGN’s own documentation recommends 30–50% slippage on memecoins, which protects the fill and becomes expensive on larger orders. A tighter cap produces more failed snipes; it does not remove the risk, it changes its shape.

Then there is everything that comes on top of the platform fee: gas, priority fees and slippage, as GMGN states in its fee documentation. On a contested launch the priority fee you pay to land the order is part of your entry price, not an overhead.

Protections are documented per tool rather than shared. Photon documents Smart-MEV protection; GMGN, Maestro, Trojan, Sigma and o1.exchange document MEV protection of their own; Bloom documents an explicit MEV switch; Sigma adds contract simulation and anti-rug tooling; Banana Gun documents an anti-rug system that tries to exit when a deployer pulls liquidity or changes taxes.

1. Set a maximum slippage you can justify, and know the price you are accepting at that cap.
2. Decide the exit before the entry: take-profit and stop-loss on GMGN, limit and DCA orders on Photon, auto-buy and auto-sell rules on Trojan.
3. Check the fee ladder rather than the headline fee: Banana Gun charges 0.5% on manual trades and 1% on snipes, and Sigma charges 1% on EVM while documenting 0% on Solana trading.
4. Confirm the official domain and Telegram handle before you fund the wallet you snipe from.

Step 2 — the Solana side: GMGN or Photon

GMGN is the heaviest-used tool on our list with about $51.9M in trailing 30-day fees on DefiLlama, a flat 1% per transaction, new-pair sniping, copy trading, take-profit, stop-loss, trailing orders and anti-MEV, across Solana and a long list of EVM chains including Ethereum, BSC and Base. Two things to keep in view: it publishes no discount for users who arrive through a referral link, and its documentation recommends that 30–50% slippage figure on memecoins.

Photon is the historical Solana web sniper, still documented with a flat 1% fee collected in SOL on every buy and sell, limit orders, DCA, multi-wallet and Smart-MEV protection, and a trading-wallet key you can export to Phantom. It has collected about $442M in fees since launch, more than any other Solana bot tracked by DefiLlama, but its 30-day fees are down to $0.4M and its documentation describes no referral perk.

If your launches are saturating the tool, latency is the constraint rather than the fee. Trojan documents nine backup bots and Sigma documents backup bots that share your wallets and settings when the main bot is slow: that is what ‘busy launch’ looks like from the operator side.

Step 3 — the BSC side: setting up a four.meme sniper

When the target launchpad is the one people search for as a four.meme sniper, the settings do not change; the chain does. What changes is which tools document BSC coverage, and that list is short in our set.

Banana Gun is the best-known EVM sniper: one account across Ethereum, Base, BSC and newer chains such as MegaETH, 0.5% on manual trades and 1% on snipes, no subscription, separate sniper and sell bots, plus its anti-rug system. Its public usage data is unusable right now — DefiLlama shows $7.2K over 30 days against $2.7M over a year — so the card number understates real use, and its referral percentages are not published.

Sigma charges a flat 1% on every EVM chain it supports, including BSC, with MEV and re-org protection, an anti-rug system, contract simulation and backup bots. It is not tracked by DefiLlama at all, so no public usage figure exists, and its own documentation lists different chains on different pages.

o1.exchange is the most EVM-focused web terminal of the three, with 99.9% of its tracked fees on EVM chains, mostly Base and BSC, and sniper, limit and TWAP orders behind a 1% headline fee that cashback brings down to 0.80% and eventually 0.60%. Its usage is small: $56K in trailing 30-day fees.

A word of method: our data files document chains, fees, features and incidents for these tools. They do not document launchpad-specific behaviour, so a sniper for a particular BSC launchpad should be chosen on published fees and protections, not on the launchpad name in its marketing.

Where sniping goes wrong

The most common failure is not a hack, it is arithmetic. A snipe that fills at a bad price, pays a priority fee and then pays two platform fees has to recover all three before it is break-even, and a token that rugs takes the whole position regardless of how well the order was routed.

MEV is documented rather than theoretical: GMGN users were hit by an MEV sandwich attack in October 2025 despite anti-MEV settings, and GMGN compensated them. Anti-MEV is a setting, not a guarantee.

The operator is also a risk. Banana Gun’s September 2024 bot compromise drained about $3M from user wallets before affected users were refunded, and Maestro’s October 2023 router exploit cost about $500K before about 610 ETH were refunded. Both are documented, and both happened to tools with published fees and real usage.

Finally, low usage is not the same thing as safety, and it is not the same thing as danger either: Sigma has no DefiLlama tracking at all, Cielo’s tracker series shows how much documentation can drift between pages, and Terminal runs a $5.3M fee base with no published fee schedule. Read the documentation you can actually find.

A prudent first snipe

Run the first few snipes on one chain, with an amount small enough that a total loss is a cost of learning rather than a problem, and with the exit already programmed.

Write down the full cost of a round trip before you start: platform fee in, platform fee out, plus gas, priority fee and slippage. On a 1% sniper with 1% on the sell as well, that is 2% before the chain charges anything.

1. Pick a tool with a published fee and a documented custody model, and read that field on its card first.
2. Cap the slippage, then check what happens to your order at that cap on a quiet launch before trying a contested one.
3. Keep the sniping wallet small and separate from any wallet you use to hold positions.
4. Verify the official domain from the tool’s card, then confirm the fee you are actually charged on the first fill.