A torch-lit runway cut into the dark, with a bamboo control tower and an aircraft made of sticks
Melanesia, 1945 · Solana, nowcargocult.lol
They performed the rites exactly

THE CARGO
CULT

They built the runway out of bamboo and lit it every night.
The planes never came back.

A website. An X account. A ticker in capitals. Wallets opening in formation. 1,144,564 runways cut in 34 days. We measured whether any of it works.

1,144,564
runways built
3.11%
had cargo land
0.97x
odds after the rites
The rites

Does performing the ritual change anything?

One rite is visible on-chain: whether a launch used pump.fun's own pinning service, or stood up its own metadata host — bought a domain, ran a server, did the work. Across 260,989 launches in seven days, here is what the extra effort bought.

Rite performedRunwaysCargoOdds
Used the default pinpump.fun did it for them 117,0463.21%1.03x
Stood up their own hostbought a domain, ran a server 143,8003.03%0.97x

Doing the work made them slightly worse off. Not ruinously — just nothing. The ritual is performed correctly and the sky stays empty.

The great strips

Some of them built eighty thousand runways.

The largest ritual-performers are automated launch services — industrial cargo cults, cutting strips by the tens of thousands. Here is what their devotion returned.

Metadata hostRunwaysCargoOdds
metadata.j7tracker.io81,6722.9%0.94x
meta.uxento.io14,9313.8%1.23x
m.rapidlaunch.io8,7763.3%1.07x
one operator on a rented database5,205 strips, every torch lit, every night 5,2050.0%0.00x
5,205
runways cut by a single operator, and not one plane landed on any of them
597,123
coins in 34 days that drew one buyer or none at all
81,672
strips from one service, at below-average odds
What we can and cannot see

The honest part.

This measures infrastructure, not taste. We can see which launches stood up their own metadata host; we cannot fetch a million documents to judge whether the website behind it was any good. And much of the "own host" column is launch bots rather than people who cared — which is its own finding, not a flaw in this one.

So the claim is narrow and we will not stretch it: the visible forms of effort do not move the odds. If somebody shows that a genuinely good site does, we will put that on this page too. Everything here is counted from public Solana data we recorded ourselves, 19 September onward.
Credits

Contract address.

Solana · pump.fun$CARGO
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