Type “pump” into SolanaTracker’s token search and it reports 415,143 matching tokens. Not 400. More than 400,000. The memecoin name space ran out of room a long time ago.
Our own launch sample shows what that crowding looks like on a single board. The corpus holds 4,659 pump.fun launches observed between November 27, 2025 and November 4, 2026. They were not spread across 4,659 names. They used 2,329 tickers.
Two of every three launches with a ticker, 3,070 of 4,652, share that ticker with at least one other launch in the same sample. 748 tickers were used twice or more.
The busiest ones:
| Ticker | Copies | Best peak | Median peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| NORTHKOREA | 36 | $13,307 | $2,494 |
| HYPEFUN | 32 | $3,438 | $2,665 |
| PUMP | 28 | $10,858 | $2,675 |
| KIM | 26 | $236,360 | $9,564 |
| CLAUDE | 25 | $13,825,085 | $2,623 |
| ELUN | 24 | $24,864 | $2,932 |
One NORTHKOREA out of 36 crossed $10,000 at peak. HYPEFUN pushed none of its 32 copies past $10,000. The best of them stalled at $3,438. The name did nothing for them.
CLAUDE is the whole finding in one row. Its best copy peaked around $13.8 million. Its median copy peaked at $2,623. For scale, the median launch in this sample sits near $2,900 market cap one minute after mint, so the typical CLAUDE copy never climbed above the average starting line. Same ticker, 25 tries, one coin of a completely different size.
Across all 748 reused tickers, the median gap between a cohort’s best copy and its worst was 5x on peak market cap. The name is shared. The outcomes are not.
Being first does not rescue the name either. Within each cohort we compared the first launch against the second. The first out-peaked the second 441 of 748 times, or 59%. Nine points better than a coin flip. The median first copy peaked at $3,472 against $3,056 for everything launched after it. A real edge, but a thin one.
A fresh name does not help either. Launches with a ticker no other launch in the sample used reached a $25,000 peak 193 of 1,581 times, or 12.2%. Shared-ticker launches made it 314 of 3,070 times, or 10.2%. Two points apart. Median peaks were $2,943 against $3,071. Close enough to call it nothing.
So the ticker carries almost no information about how a launch ends. What does the work is the book under the name: who holds the supply, how much of it sits in the top 10 wallets, how much of the buying is bundled or bot-driven, and what it costs to actually sell into the pool behind the coin. That is what the live board scores on every card, and it is the same book the pool test reads when it checks whether a market cap is real money or a thin pool with a number pinned to it.
This is why two coins can wear the same name and belong to different worlds. The one CLAUDE that ran did not run because of the letters in its ticker. The 24 that died did not die because of them. The 5x median spread inside name cohorts is the size of the gap the name fails to explain.
The clock does not care about the name either. Of the launches with a full six-hour trace, 65% peaked inside their first five minutes. Most of a launch’s life is over before a name could matter, and the first hour piece walks through that window in detail.
None of this says a shared-name coin cannot run. KIM put one copy at a $236,360 peak while its median copy stopped under $10,000, a gap of more than twenty times inside one cohort. It says the name tells you nothing about which copy is in front of you. The book does, and so does the exit cost, the price of selling your bag into the pool as it stands.
The crowding itself is measurable. SolanaTracker’s search totals on the morning of November 7, 2026: 1,095,242 tokens matching “ai”, more than 870,000 matching “cat”, 283,306 matching “pepe”, 208,686 matching “doge”, and 147,472 matching “inu”. Those counts cover its whole Solana token index, not pump.fun alone. Whatever name is on a card, hundreds of thousands of listings answer to something like it.
Method. The launch sample is 4,659 pump.fun launches observed from November 27, 2025 to November 4, 2026. 4,652 carried a ticker, and tickers were compared after removing the dollar sign and ignoring case. Peak market cap is the highest value in each launch’s six-hour price trace. 2,471 launches have a full trace; the rest use the market cap at first observation, which understates their peaks. Search counts come from SolanaTracker’s token search on November 7, 2026, and match against its full Solana token index. The matching is looser than exact-name equality, so treat those totals as a crowding measure, not a census. Everything here is a measurement of a past sample, not a forecast about any coin.
