How Much Money Are DeFi Creators Leaving Unclaimed? We Tracked $2M+ to Find Out

About 40% of all creator fees generated on DeFi launchpads never get claimed. We know this because we built a tool to track them, and the numbers are hard to ignore.

Over the past several months, we scanned 520+ unique wallets across 9 launchpads on 4 chains using ClaimScan. We tracked over $2 million in creator fees. Roughly $800K of that sat unclaimed.

This post breaks down what we found, why it happens, and how to check if you are leaving money on the table.

What We Did

We built ClaimScan to solve a problem we kept running into ourselves: DeFi creators launch tokens across multiple platforms and chains, fees accumulate in different places, and there is no single dashboard that shows you everything.

So we built one. ClaimScan connects to 9 launchpads across Solana, Base, Ethereum, and BSC. You paste a wallet address and get a full picture of every unclaimed fee sitting on every supported platform.

After launching and getting adoption, we started analyzing the aggregate data. The pattern was consistent: a large portion of earned fees never move. Here is what the data showed.

The Findings

Across 520+ wallets scanned, we identified three distinct behavioral patterns:

Never Claimed

A significant portion of wallets had zero claim history on one or more platforms where they had generated fees. These creators launched, generated revenue through bonding curves or transfer fee extensions, and simply never went back to collect. The fees exist on-chain. The wallet address is right there. The money just sits.

Partially Claimed

The most common pattern. Creators claimed fees on one platform but had unclaimed balances on others. A creator active on Pump.fun who claimed there but never set up their Bags.fm or Clanker dashboard is the typical case. They claimed what they knew about and missed everything else.

Abandoned Small Amounts

Lots of wallets had small unclaimed balances (amounts under $50) that were never worth a separate transaction to claim individually. Across hundreds of wallets, those small amounts aggregate to real money. The ecosystem is full of micro-balances that creators wrote off as not worth the gas or effort.

Breakdown by Chain

Solana: Highest Volume

Solana dominates the data. Pump.fun, Bags.fm, Believe, RevShare, Coinbarrel, and Raydium LaunchLab all operate on Solana, and the memecoin launch volume there is enormous. Most of the $2M+ we tracked came from Solana-based activity. Unclaimed fees here are often tied to bonding curve mechanics and transfer fee extensions on SPL tokens.

Base: Growing Fast

Base is growing quickly. Clanker and Bankr are both active on Base and we are seeing more wallets with Base-specific unclaimed fees with each passing week. The Coinbase ecosystem push has brought a new wave of creators who may not be as familiar with where their fees accumulate.

BSC: New Addition

BSC support is newer in our dataset. Clanker on BSC is included in ClaimScan's coverage. Volume is lower relative to Solana and Base but the unclaimed percentage is consistent with the overall trend.

Ethereum: Steady

Zora on Ethereum rounds out the coverage. Ethereum fee amounts tend to be higher per claim due to gas costs historically, which may explain why Ethereum creators are slightly more likely to claim when amounts reach a meaningful threshold. But unclaimed balances still exist.

Breakdown by Platform

Pump.fun has the highest raw volume of unclaimed fees in our dataset, which makes sense given it has the most total launch activity on Solana. Creators who launched early and moved on often have fees sitting in protocol rewards they never pulled.

Bags.fm is notable because FINN, the founder, publicly endorsed ClaimScan after seeing what we built. Bags uses a different fee structure and creators who migrated from other platforms sometimes miss the Bags-specific claim flow entirely.

Clanker shows up heavily across both Base and BSC. The cross-chain nature of Clanker means creators sometimes claim on one chain and forget the other entirely.

Raydium LaunchLab and Believe both generate DAMM pool fees that have their own claim interfaces separate from what most creators check regularly.

Why Creators Don't Claim

The data points to three root causes:

Fragmentation

Nine platforms. Four chains. Different wallets for different chains. Each platform has its own dashboard, its own API, its own claim button in a different corner of its own UI. There is no protocol-level standard for how creator fees are stored or accessed. Tracking all of this manually requires a spreadsheet and a lot of discipline. Most creators don't have time for that.

Small Amounts Feel Not Worth It

When you are busy with a launch, a $30 unclaimed balance on Coinbarrel doesn't feel worth the 20 minutes it takes to find the right dashboard, connect the right wallet, and execute the claim. That logic is understandable for a single balance. It breaks down when you have 6 platforms with $30 each.

Creators Move On

The memecoin and DeFi launch cycle is fast. Creators launch, the token runs or doesn't, and they are already building the next thing. Fees from a launch three months ago fall off the mental radar entirely. The money is still there. The creator just stopped looking.

The Real Cost

Our dataset covers 520+ wallets and $2M+ in fees. That is not the full market. That is just the wallets that passed through ClaimScan.

If 40% of fees go unclaimed across all active DeFi creators on these platforms, the ecosystem-wide number is significantly larger. We are talking about tens of millions of dollars sitting in smart contracts, waiting for wallets that may never come back to claim them.

This is not hypothetical money. It was earned. It exists on-chain. It just is not being collected.

How to Check Your Fees

Go to claimscan.tech. Paste your wallet address. ClaimScan checks all 9 supported platforms across all 4 chains and shows you every unclaimed balance in one view.

If you have ever launched a token on Pump.fun, Bags.fm, Believe, RevShare, Coinbarrel, Raydium LaunchLab, Clanker, Bankr, or Zora, there is a reasonable chance you have fees you have not claimed yet. Takes about 30 seconds to find out.

No wallet connection required to scan. We built it to be frictionless because the whole point is to lower the barrier to actually checking.