Realised vs Unrealised PnL: What a Wallet Really Made

A wallet showing $200,000 profit on a memecoin might have banked $15,000 of it. The rest is a bag priced at a level nobody can actually sell at. If you're picking wallets to follow, or judging your own position, the split between the two numbers matters more than the total.

What is the difference between realised and unrealised PnL?

Realised PnL is settled: the wallet sold, the native coin landed, and the number can't change. Unrealised PnL is a valuation: tokens still held, multiplied by the current price, minus what they cost.

That current price is usually the last trade or the pool's spot price. It's the price of selling one more token, not the price of selling the whole bag. On a deep pool the difference is small. On a fresh memecoin it can be most of the number.

Why can't a wallet sell at the price its PnL shows?

Because selling moves the price against you. Most DEX pools (Uniswap v2 style, PancakeSwap v2, Raydium's standard pools) are constant-product pools: the pool's native-coin reserve times its token reserve stays fixed. Every token you sell in pushes native coin out, and each one gets a slightly worse rate than the one before.

The math is simple enough to do on a phone. If you sell an amount equal to X of the pool's token reserve, you get back roughly 1 / (1 + X) of the paper value, before fees and tax:

• Bag = 10% of the pool's tokens: about 91% of paper value.
• Bag = 25%: about 80%.
• Bag = 50%: about 67%.
• Bag = 100%: about 50%.

Note the comparison is against the pool's token reserve, not total supply. A wallet holding 3% of supply can hold 30% of what's actually sitting in the pool if most supply sits in other wallets or a burn address.

What does that look like on a real-sized memecoin?

A made-up BNB Chain token. The pool holds 20 BNB and 1,000M tokens, so the spot price is 0.00000002 BNB per token. A wallet holds 250M tokens.

• Paper value: 250M x 0.00000002 = 5 BNB. That's what the unrealised column shows.
• Actual sell: after the 0.25% swap fee, about 3.99 BNB comes out. That's 20% gone to price impact before anything else.
• With a 5% sell tax taken from the tokens first: about 3.83 BNB.
• Price after: the pool now holds about 16 BNB and 1,250M tokens. Spot price is down 36%, and every other holder's unrealised PnL just dropped with it.

The tell people miss: splitting the sell doesn't fix it. Two back-to-back sells of 125M in that pool return the same 3.99 BNB, because the second chunk sells into the price the first one left. Selling in pieces only helps if new buyers add BNB to the pool in between.

When is unrealised PnL worth nothing at all?

• The token can't be sold. A honeypot still has a price, so the bag still shows a value. The exit is zero.
• The liquidity is gone. After an LP pull, a tool may still mark the bag at the last trade before the pull.
• The last price was a single tiny trade. On a quiet token, one small buy can set the mark for every holder. Anyone can print paper gains that way.
• Everyone holds the same bag. Ten wallets each sitting on 10% of the pool can't all exit at 91%. Whoever sells first gets the good price, and the rest sell into a falling pool.

How should you read a wallet's PnL before following it?

Judge skill on realised. Treat unrealised as overhang. A wallet that turned profits into native coin across many tokens has shown it can exit. A wallet with a huge unrealised number has shown it can buy, and its bag is future sell pressure on anyone who follows it in. Big realised profit can still be fake if the tokens were never bought, so run the fake smart money checks too.

When you see a big unrealised number on a top traders list, do the check in two minutes:

1. Open the pool's address on the block explorer and read its two balances: the token and the native coin (or stablecoin).
2. Divide the wallet's token balance by the pool's token balance. That's X.
3. Paper value x 1 / (1 + X) is the most it could get out in one go, before tax.

Or let the DEX do it: enter the full bag as a sell on the swap screen and read the quote and price impact without confirming. Concentrated-liquidity pools (v3 style) don't follow the simple formula, so the swap quote is the better check there.

The same math applies to you. Before you buy, know what share of the pool your full position would be. If getting out costs you 20% at today's liquidity, the token has to move 25% just for you to break even.

How does MoonRadar handle realised and unrealised profit?

The MoonRadar scanner ranks every wallet that traded a token by realised plus unrealised profit, so check how much of a top wallet's number is still a bag before you trust it. Paste a wallet into the wallet finder to see every token it traded with per-token PnL. The Top traders board ranks wallets by realised profit only, across every token they traded recently.

That's the logic behind tracking smart money on realised record rather than paper gains. The scanner also screens the token itself for honeypots, sell tax and liquidity, since a bag you can't sell is worth nothing however it's marked. Past profit is a record, not a promise, and most memecoins still fail.