Resisting Manipulative Bots in Meme Coin Copy Trading: A Multi-Agent Approach with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Copy trading has become the dominant entry strategy in meme coin markets. However, due to the market's extremely illiquid and volatile nature, the strategy exposes an exploitable attack surface: adversaries deploy manipulative bots to front-run trades, conceal positions, and fabricate sentiment, systematically extracting value from naïve copiers at scale. Despite its prevalence, bot-driven manipulation remains largely unexplored, and no robust defensive framework exists. We propose a manipulation-resistant copy-trading system based on a multi-agent architecture powered by a multimodal large language model (LLM) and chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Our approach outperforms zero-shot and most statisticdriven baselines in prediction accuracy as well as all baselines in economic performance, achieving an average copier return of 3% per meme coin investment under realistic market frictions. Overall, our results demonstrate the effectiveness of agent-based defenses and predictability of trader profitability in adversarial meme coin markets, providing a practical foundation for robust copy trading. CCS Concepts • Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence; • Applied computing → Economics.