Tokens Never Die - Arthur Sabintsev's Thoughts

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Tokens Never Die<br>Projects die. Tokens don't. They get repurposed.

Arthur Sabintsev<br>May 26, 2026

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When a public company runs out of money there’s a legal off-ramp. The court closes the cap table. Shares are marked to zero on a specific date.<br>Token contracts have none of that. They keep executing transfers on every chain until the validators that secure that chain go offline.<br>The token is its own product, during the project’s life and after. It tends to have no bearing on the work. The price tracks attention, narrative, and bots, not output.<br>So when a project stops shipping, the token doesn’t die. It gets an afterlife, and the afterlife has its own economy.

No pulse, yet still trading.<br>The Food Chain

Four algorithmic layers stack on every dead token with a stranded liquidity pool, the LP that nobody pulled when the project quit, still holding the token against ETH, SOL, USDC, or whatever it was paired with.<br>Volume bots. Paid services that manufacture trades between rotating wallets. Chainalysis traced one operator, Volume.li, to $257.5 million in cumulative fake volume. Packages are priced by output: tiers run from $50 of manufactured volume in 24 hours up to $100,000 in 24 hours. As of Chainalysis’s 2025 reporting, the top tier cost roughly about 0.2 ETH. The whole category exists to push pairs onto DEXScreener, DEXTools, Photon, and pump.fun trending feeds, because aggregator algorithms reward volume.<br>Momentum bots. Algorithmic traders watching the trending feeds and piling into anything that spikes. No thesis on the project. The thesis is the chart which again signifies that the token is its own product.<br>MEV and sandwich bots. On illiquid pairs the front-run/back-run economics scale beautifully, because small trades shift price meaningfully. Sandwich extraction on Ethereum cooled from roughly $10 million a month in late 2024 to $2.5 million by October 2025, but the bots never leave. Solana’s Jito ecosystem runs the same playbook with different plumbing. Sandwich bots have extracted between $370 and $500 million from Solana traders over a 16 month window, and even after Jito, Marinade, and the Solana Foundation blacklisted 50+ malicious validators in 2025, October still saw roughly 18,000 SOL pulled from 200,000 victims.<br>Pump groups. They understand the food chain better than the average founder ever did. Find a zombie with a stranded LP. Accumulate quietly while attention is elsewhere. Fire a coordinated buy at a known block or slot. The volume spike registers on DEXScreener and pump.fun trending. The momentum bots watching those feeds pile in. The MEV bots back-run every new trade. The pump group sells into that climbing bot stack. Retail isn’t there anymore.<br>Chainalysis counted 2.06 million tokens launched in 2024. Only 1.7% had meaningful trading inside thirty days. Layer in Solana’s pump.fun launches, every Cosmos appchain token, every L2 memecoin, and the dead population is bigger than any single chain’s data captures. The 98.3% don’t go to zero. They go quiet for a while, and then they’re raised from the dead.<br>Dead tokens don’t die. They get repurposed.

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