The Business of Memes: Inside the Solana Meme Coin Factory Pump.Fun

It could be to dismiss meme cash as simply one other fad—a market filled with traps and scams that arguably encourages the worst facets of the cryptocurrency business. However the Solana token launchpad Pump.enjoyable has confirmed meme cash are large enterprise, and the enterprise it’s already generated is not any joke.

Now, amid slowing income and rising competitors from rival launchpads, the query turns into: Is it a enterprise that’s sustainable?

Pump.enjoyable lately raised $600 million in a large sale of its PUMP token, an ICO paying homage to the 2017 craze. The corporate is chargeable for the launch of nearly 12 million tokens—particular person cryptocurrencies purchased and bought by degens world wide. In so doing, the corporate has generated greater than $774 million in income in lower than two years—a quantity that rivals complete networks and infrastructure suppliers which are essential parts of the on-chain economic system as a complete.



“Pump.enjoyable is without doubt one of the most used apps in crypto historical past,” Adam Tehc, knowledge analyst and Dune dashboard creator, instructed Decrypt. However curiosity within the platform has waned of late, stated Tehc. And the information helps his view.

In January, Pump.enjoyable’s greatest month so far amid meme coin mania, the launchpad generated $136,743,809 in income. Over the previous month, based on Dune, the platform has amassed simply $26,390,173 in income—that’s an 80% decline.

Nonetheless, the lifetime numbers Pump.enjoyable boasts are undeniably spectacular—maybe all of the extra spectacular when you think about its humble roots.

Pump.Enjoyable: The way it began

The venture began as an concept between three crypto degens who wished to make it simpler to create tokens. On the time, the co-founders—Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler, and Noah Tweedale—had been working remotely from their laptops.

Inside just a few months, they began to rent staff—together with a senior developer who went rogue—and commenced working from a WeWork in London. Now, Cohen instructed Decrypt, Pump.enjoyable has over 70 staff throughout the Americas, Europe, the Center East, and Asia.

“We don’t have strict boundaries round groups, however we do place staff based mostly on specialties like cell, livestreaming, chat, infrastructure, and so forth,” he defined. “Nobody group is considerably bigger than one other. When we have now a necessity, we shift members from throughout a number of groups to concentrate on single product priorities.”

All through its 18-month lifespan, Pump.enjoyable earned the title of the quickest crypto app to hit $100 million in income and has since generated greater than $774 million, per Dune knowledge. Cohen declined to enter specifics relating to how a lot of that is thought-about revenue, however he added that “the overwhelming majority of funds are reinvested straight into product growth.”

Dmitry Lapidus, Head of APAC at CoinFund, instructed Decrypt this type of cash locations Pump.enjoyable within the high 5 to 10 largest crypto initiatives when it comes to present income. Forward of it are the likes of Tether, Circle, Ethereum, and Solana itself—core infrastructure parts that not solely have been round for for much longer, however present the instruments for initiatives like Pump.enjoyable to exist within the first place.

Pump.Enjoyable: The way it’s going

Pump.enjoyable permits anybody to create a token in minutes, if not seconds, with out having to pay a dime. Following its launch in January 2024, it shortly grew to become the go-to place for all issues meme cash. Earlier than lengthy, startups that wished their very own tokens took to the platform, and livestreams on Pump began to blow up—generally actually.

The cultural and financial relevance it garnered is what enabled the corporate to lift $600 million in an ICO in simply 12 minutes. The PUMP token soared into the high 65 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization upon launch, but it surely has since dropped to 84th.

PUMP climbed above a $6 billion valuation, however fell to as little as $4.2 billion on Monday—only a hair above its ICO worth. The token is at the moment down nearly 20% during the last seven days, per CoinGecko.

Preliminary curiosity within the PUMP token might have been partially spurred by just a few rounds of buybacks from the platform—totalling $19.73 million, per Tehc. Degens imagine that is the beginning of the platform sharing its income with token holders—a lovely proposition, as long as the platform’s utilization and income continues to develop. However will it?

“These days, there hasn’t been the identical starvation for Pump.enjoyable tokens,” stated Tehc.

In its lifetime, Pump.enjoyable has been chargeable for the creation of just about 11.9 million tokens. To place that into perspective, Etherscan can solely discover 1.6 million ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. At its January peak, Pump.enjoyable created 70,576 in a single day. Nevertheless, based on Tehc’s Dune dashboard, this determine has since fallen to 10,000 to fifteen,000 a day.

The drop comes as LetsBonk, a rival launchpad led by the group behind the BONK meme coin, has stolen vital market share from Pump.enjoyable. For 14 out of the previous 15 days, per Dune, LetsBonk has been accountable for almost all of meme coin launches on Solana. Again in April, Pump.enjoyable was chargeable for nearly 100% of all launchpad exercise on the community.

Over on Myriad, a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s dad or mum firm Dastan, sentiment amongst PUMP and BONK crypto merchants is mirrored in a market that pits the cash in opposition to one another. Myriad customers at the moment strongly favor BONK having a bigger market cap than PUMP by the top of July. It might have appeared doable for PUMP to flip BONK simply after Pump.enjoyable’s token launched and the hype was at its peak, however now the cash are separated by greater than $1 billion in market cap, with BONK main the way in which.



“It’s fairly clear that the identical factor that we noticed form of within the NFT cycle, the place it begins as this real market, then [becomes] very exploited,” Tehc instructed Decrypt, if reference to Pump.enjoyable shedding market share to LetsBonk. “You will have extra superior instruments. You will have extra buying and selling bots. You will have extra individuals creating all varieties of token creation bots, sniping bots, all of these things,” he stated. “It’s simply pure.”

Pump.enjoyable has certainly spawned a complete economic system of instruments beneath it. “Bump bots,” for instance, shortly purchase and promote a specific token, so it is repeatedly proven on the Pump.enjoyable homepage. In fact, there’s a extra sinister facet to the underground economic system filled with rug-pull instruments, bundle bots, and extra.

Tehc argues dealer curiosity within the platform has waned in consequence, and as degens search for platforms with extra natural buying and selling conduct by which to take a position. He says that is greatest seen via Pump.enjoyable’s commencement charge dropping from 1.67% in November to as little as 0.58% in Could.

“Graduating” refers to when a token hits a pre-defined market cap, at the moment $66,000, and turns into tradable on Pump.enjoyable’s personal decentralized change PumpSwap. By graduating, 206,900,000 of the graduating token and 85 SOL are put into the PumpSwap liquidity pool to allow smoother buying and selling.

“Usually, when the commencement charge will increase, it means there’s extra starvation within the trenches,” Tehc defined. “And when it is on the lowest, that’s when the trenches are essentially the most fatigued,” he stated. “For instance, now we see a barely greater commencement charge on the BONK launch pad, which I feel signifies that persons are extra hungry to purchase BONK tokens than PUMP tokens.”

Cohen, Pump.enjoyable’s founder, believes meme cash will naturally hover round a 1% commencement charge.

“On the earth of memecoins—and the marketplace for collectibles extra broadly—it’s the ~1% that actually issues. Just about every little thing else is noise,” Cohen instructed Decrypt. “Whether or not it’s meme cash, buying and selling playing cards, or social media posts, the market mechanism is identical—the magic is out there’s means to discern and assign worth to the issues which are most vital.”

The talent of meme coin buying and selling is in choosing that high percentile of initiatives which are going to succeed, as fleeting as that success could also be.

The highest dealer on Pump.enjoyable, as tracked by Tehc’s Dune dashboard, has realized greater than $41 million in revenue with a complete of 151 wallets profiting greater than $1 million. It’s value noting, nevertheless, this dashboard solely data pre-graduation buys, and a variety of buying and selling occurs post-graduation. Regardless, the information wizard warns that almost all of those “high merchants” aren’t even actual individuals.

“I feel the highest 50 wallets, on essentially the most worthwhile web page, is 49 bots and one Cupsey,” he stated, referring to infamous dealer Cupsey. “There are mass deployers, there are sniper bots, quantity bots […] principally it is snipers.”

One of the crucial worthwhile methods, Tehc says, is to launch a token on Pump.enjoyable and rug it inside minutes and even seconds. One dealer, for instance, bagged $840,000 over simply three months by spamming 17,000 tokens—every time promoting their provide inside seconds. 

This technique solely grew to become extra worthwhile with the introduction of creator income sharing, which provides token deployers a reduce of the buying and selling charges related to a coin. One token creator earned $93,780 in three weeks after the function was carried out.

“We function totally on-chain, and the information you see are the identical that we see,” Cohen stated. “You will have a real-time view into who we’re, how we function, and the way we carry out. That’s the great thing about life on-chain.”

Nevertheless, he warned in opposition to focusing too closely on knowledge alone—particularly inside the firm.

“Information are nice, however UX means every little thing,” Cohen stated. “You need to construct a product that customers take pleasure in and that generates worth. Enjoyable and worth are mirrored within the knowledge,” he stated. “In that manner, knowledge are a secondary driver.”