How memecoin KOLs actually get paid, and what that means for the calls you follow

Posted by the operator of RebateMax

I earn a referral commission from BingX and LBank when you register through my links. That is the same kind of income this post is about, so I will say it first and come back to it at the end. I have no relationship with Axiom, GMGN, pump.fun, Kolscan or any trader, and none of them has seen this post. The terminal figures below come from each terminal's own documentation, read on 18 October 2026. The arithmetic is mine, and I show it so you can check it.

This is the deep version of one section of Memecoin trading, honestly. That post covers the odds, the costs and the terminals. This one covers the money behind the people you follow.

The short version

• A caller can be paid when you trade, not only when they win. Axiom, one of the two largest Solana trading terminals, pays a referrer 30% of its net fee on every trade a referred user makes. GMGN advertises 10% to 30%.
• That money arrives whether your trade wins or loses. A fee is charged on every buy and every sell, so the referrer's income depends on how much the audience trades, not on how well.
• The best-known leaderboard is owned by pump.fun, the platform most of these coins launch on.
• Paid promotion is common and rarely labelled. In one leaked campaign reported by The Block, about 160 influencers accepted payment and fewer than five of them marked their posts as advertising.
• None of this makes a call wrong. It means a call is not evidence on its own. Five questions at the end help you tell the difference.

Who the KOLs are

KOL stands for key opinion leader. In memecoins it means a trader with a large audience on X, Telegram or a live stream, who posts what they are buying. Followers copy the trade, often quickly, usually through a trading terminal: a website or Telegram bot that buys and sells new coins faster than a normal wallet.

The flagship post names a few of the best-known traders, with a source for each claim. I am not adding traders' names here. This post is about how the money works, and the mechanism is the same whoever is posting.

Some of these traders make money trading. That is real for a few, and hard to verify from outside, for reasons the scoreboard section below explains. The rest of this post is about the other ways.

Way 1: referral fees on every follower trade

The large terminals each charge a fee on every trade, about 1% of the trade's value, on top of pump.fun's own fees and the Solana network's. Most of them share part of that fee with whoever referred the trader.

Axiom. Its referral page states three levels. A direct referral earns the referrer 30% of Axiom's net fee on every trade. Someone that person refers earns the original referrer 3%, and the level below that 2%. Axiom's own worked example: a referred user trades $10,000 in a day, Axiom's fee at 1% is $100, and the referrer receives $30. The page also says commissions have no cap, and that users who sign up through a referral link get a 10% discount on trading fees.

GMGN. Its documentation offers "10% to 30%" in commissions, rising with the volume a referrer brings in, and invites referrers to bring in their Telegram group members and X followers. It also describes adding GMGN's contract-check bot to a Telegram group and asking GMGN to put the group owner's referral code on the bot's buttons. In a group set up that way, a member who signs up through those buttons does so on the owner's code.

Now scale Axiom's own example, which is my arithmetic and not a figure anyone has reported about a real person. If an audience puts $1,000,000 of trades through one referral link in a day, that is at most about $10,000 in terminal fees, and up to about $3,000 to the referrer for that day. It is less in practice, because Axiom's net fee starts below 1% and referred users get 10% off. It does not matter whether those trades made or lost money: the fee is charged on every buy and every sell, and that $1,000,000 already counts both.

That is the part worth sitting with. A caller paid this way earns most on the days their audience trades most, and memecoin audiences trade most when something is moving fast. The income rewards activity. It does not reward being right.

Way 2: the scoreboard that ranks them

Most people judge a memecoin trader by a leaderboard: a site that tracks wallets labelled with traders' names and ranks them by profit. The best-known of these, Kolscan, was bought by pump.fun in July 2025, as CoinDesk reported. The platform where most of these coins launch owns the board that ranks the people promoting them. A high rank brings a trader audience, and audience is what brings referral volume.

A leaderboard is also only as good as its labels. It ranks the wallets someone has tagged with a trader's name. Nothing requires a trader to use only that wallet, and a wallet that shows a big win on one day says nothing about the losses in wallets you cannot see.

Way 3: being paid to post

On 1 September 2025 the investigator ZachXBT published a spreadsheet from one token's marketing campaign. The Block reported that the documents appear to show more than 200 influencers were approached, about 160 accepted payment, and fewer than five labelled their posts as advertising. The Block named none of them, and neither will I.

Where regulators can reach it, an unlabelled paid post is treated as a real problem. In 2022 the US Securities and Exchange Commission charged Kim Kardashian for promoting a token on Instagram without disclosing that she had been paid $250,000 for the post. She settled for $1.26 million without admitting or denying the findings. Most memecoin callers are anonymous or outside any regulator's practical reach, so the label usually depends on the caller choosing to add it.

Way 4: content, and the attention itself

Streams, videos, sponsorships and paid groups are ordinary media income, and many callers earn it openly.

The last way is the one people find hardest to see. When a widely followed trader buys a new coin, followers buy after them, and their buying lifts the price. Whoever bought first is sitting on a gain that the followers' buying created. A paper accepted at the 2026 Web Conference, cited in the flagship post, shows from the bonding curve's own formula that a copier pays a higher price than the wallet being copied on every buy, because the copied wallet's purchase has already moved the price. I am describing how the mechanism works, not accusing any trader of using it on purpose.

How to read a call, knowing all this

None of this means a caller is lying, or that a call cannot be good. It means a call, by itself, is not evidence. Before acting on one, ask five questions.

1. What does the caller earn if I lose? If the link in the post, the bio or the group's bot carries a referral code, the answer is: the same as if you win. That is worth knowing before you size the trade.
2. Is it labelled? "Ad", "sponsored" or "paid" means you know what you are reading. No label does not mean it was not paid; in the campaign above, fewer than five of about 160 paid influencers labelled their posts.
3. When did they buy? If the caller's labelled wallet bought well before the post, the post arrives after their best price. Followers who buy on the post are buying from earlier buyers, possibly including the caller.
4. Whose scoreboard is this? A rank is a statement about labelled wallets, over a chosen window, on a board with its own owner. One good day on one wallet is not a track record.
5. Would I take this trade without the name attached? Check the contract, the pool and the price yourself. How we decide which tokens to cover lists the checks our desk runs before it measures any coin, and you can run every one of them.

The same question, asked of me

I earn the same kind of fee. When you register on BingX through my link, BingX pays me 60% of the trading fees you generate; I return 50 of those points to you as a lifetime fee discount and keep 10. LBank pays me a referral commission too. So my income also rises when you trade more, and you should read everything I publish with that in mind.

What I can do about it is make it checkable. Every figure in this post links to its source below. Our own signals are graded in public, losses included, on the scoreboard, and you can verify the rebate on your own exchange statement rather than taking my word for it. Ask the five questions above of me as well.

Questions people ask

Do all memecoin callers use referral links? No. Some post no links at all. The point is to check, not to assume.

Is earning a referral fee wrong? No. It is a normal business model, and it is mine. It becomes a problem when it is hidden, or when it is the real reason behind the call.

Is a big leaderboard rank proof that a trader is good? It is proof that one labelled wallet did well over the window shown. It says nothing about other wallets, and it cannot show what the trader was paid to post.

What do I lose by using a referral link? Usually nothing extra, and sometimes you gain a discount: Axiom gives referred users 10% off its fee. The cost is not in the link. It is in trading more, or trading worse, because someone with a fee on your volume told you to.

Sources

• Axiom, referral program (read 18 October 2026): docs.axiom.trade/getting-started/referral-program. Source for the 30% / 3% / 2% levels, the $10,000 example, no cap, and the 10% discount for referred users.
• Axiom, fee tiers (read 18 October 2026): docs.axiom.trade/getting-started/fees/axiom-fees. Source for the net fee of 0.95% down to 0.75% by tier. The referral page also notes that some tokens may be left out of rewards for technical reasons.
• pump.fun, fee documentation: pump.fun/docs/fees.
• Axiom and GMGN as the two largest terminals: see the terminal section and DefiLlama source in Memecoin trading, honestly.
• GMGN, referral program and Telegram group bot (read 18 October 2026): docs.gmgn.ai/index/cooperation-referral-refer-friends-to-earn-rebate-30-rebates-easily-earn-over-usd8000-monthly.
• CoinDesk, on pump.fun acquiring Kolscan (11 July 2025): coindesk.com/markets/2025/07/11/pumpfun-acquires-wallet-tracker-kolscan-to-expand-onchain-trading-tools.
• The Block, on ZachXBT's paid-promotion documents (1 September 2025): theblock.co/post/368956.
• US Securities and Exchange Commission, press release 2022-183: sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022-183.
• Luo, Feng, Xu and Liu, "Resisting Manipulative Bots in Meme Coin Copy Trading" (The Web Conference 2026): arxiv.org/abs/2601.08641. Source for the copier paying a higher price on every replicated buy.

Earlier posts that bear on this one: Memecoin trading, honestly, pump.fun explained and Do crypto signals actually work?

Disclosure: RebateMax earns affiliate commission on trading fees generated by accounts registered through its BingX link and returns 50 of those 60 commission points as a lifetime discount. The full arithmetic is here. RebateMax also earns a referral commission from LBank. It has no commercial relationship with Axiom, GMGN, pump.fun, Kolscan or any person named in this post. Memecoins are extremely high risk and most go to zero. This post is general information, not financial or tax advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to trade. Think a figure is wrong? See the corrections policy.