Bitquery Finds External Buy Rates Flat at 53% vs 52% After Solana (SOL) Slot Cut

Bitquery's 1.3-Second Buyer Comparison

Solana (SOL) shipped the final stage of its slot-time reduction on Oct 9, when the network's target slot interval reached 200 milliseconds, a step the Solana Foundation's official upgrade records date to that day. The measurement lands as Solana price and network throughput draw attention in the rollout's aftermath. An on-chain analysis published Tuesday by Bitquery, the blockchain data firm, now offers a structured check of buyer behavior around token launches across the earlier stages, and its headline number is close to a tie. Bitquery measured the share of newly launched pump.fun coins bought by external wallets, meaning wallets other than the first buyer, within roughly 1.3 seconds of a coin's first trade. That share ran at 53% in samples taken before the reduction stages and 52% in samples taken afterward. pump.fun is the meme coin launchpad whose one-click token deploys, an ICO compressed to a single transaction, feed the most speculative end of the altcoin market, a flow in which late entrants often serve as exit liquidity for early ones. The samples come from Aug 5, Aug 12, Aug 19, Sep 23, Sep 30 and Oct 7, and the dataset stops on Oct 7, two days before the last stage applied, so no trading under the final 200-millisecond setting is included. Solana (SOL) reached that setting in steps, cutting the target slot time from 400 milliseconds through 350, 300 and 250; a slot is the time window a validator is assigned to produce a block. Two raw figures did move in the samples. The share of new coins that recorded an external buy inside the first block fell from 42% to 32%, and the first block itself shortened from about 0.42 seconds to 0.27 seconds. Bitquery reads that drop as a measurement artifact rather than a behavioral shift: a shorter first block leaves less wall-clock time for anyone to act. It therefore re-ran the comparison at a fixed elapsed time of about 1.3 seconds, equal to three slots before the cut and five slots after. On that like-for-like basis, the external buy share held at 53% versus 52%.

Sandwich Data and the Foundation's Caveat

The 1.3-second metric has stated limits. It shows how fast outside wallets arrived, not whether those wallets ran automation or what any buyer intended; a copy-trade bot and a human reacting to a ticker produce identical raw counts. Bot risk on the network is not theoretical: the Bloom Trading bot drain removed 9,408 Solana (SOL), worth $947,000, from a single wallet in an earlier incident. Bitquery also separates early external buying from sandwich attacks, which work differently: an attacker buys just before a victim's swap and sells just after, capturing the price impact that swap creates. Its detection counts per 10,000 swaps, computed as detections divided by trading volume on pump.fun and PumpSwap, the swap venue attached to the pump.fun ecosystem, moved from about 30 in early August to 21 between Aug 29 and Sep 17, then back up to 33 from Sep 19 to Oct 7. The ratio is taken before the final filter, so raw detections, not confirmed attacks, form the numerator. A separate Bitquery tally covering Oct 30, 2025 through Oct 7 counted 6.85 million sandwich attacks on Solana and estimated $29.7 million in profit on a pre-attack cost basis; that tally uses a different period and basis and does not feed the ratio comparison. Neither figure has been updated past Oct 7. The Solana Foundation's own analysis avoids a one-way conclusion on the slot change. Shorter slots compress an attacker's reaction time, but fewer competing transactions processed within the same slot can leave room inside the price movement a user has already approved. Processing capacity carries a matching caveat: per-slot limits were adjusted alongside the shorter interval, so the network's total throughput does not rise in proportion to the slot cut. Post-Oct-9 trading and the automated share of external buys both sit outside the published comparison.

What Runs Now and What Is Still Unmeasured

The published numbers describe a baseline across the earlier slot stages, not a verdict on the regime now live. What runs on Solana today, and did not run before Oct 9, is a 200-millisecond target slot across the full path down from 400 milliseconds. The like-for-like measurement that matters, external buy rates and automation shares on post-Oct-9 blocks, has not been produced yet. Usage elsewhere on the network moves independently: Solana tokenized stock holders hit 1.5 million, an all-time high, on a separate track. Entry routes described in our How to Buy Solana Meme Coins guide work the same under the shorter interval, and any price-level read belongs to chart work such as Solana technical analysis rather than to this rollout data. The next useful release from the on-chain record will be the same 1.3-second test re-run on blocks produced after Oct 9.