9 min read
It might be to dismiss meme coins as just another fad—a market full of traps and scams that arguably encourages the worst aspects of the cryptocurrency industry. But the Solana token launchpad Pump.fun has proven meme coins are big business, and the business it’s already generated is no joke.
Now, amid slowing revenue and growing competition from rival launchpads, the question becomes: Is it a business that’s sustainable?
Pump.fun recently raised $600 million in a massive sale of its PUMP token, an ICO reminiscent of the 2017 craze. The company is responsible for the launch of almost 12 million tokens—individual cryptocurrencies bought and sold by degens around the world. In so doing, the company has generated more than $774 million in revenue in less than two years—a number that rivals entire networks and infrastructure providers that are crucial components of the on-chain economy as a whole.
“Pump.fun is one of the most used apps in crypto history,” Adam Tehc, data analyst and Dune dashboard creator, told Decrypt. But interest in the platform has waned of late, said Tehc. And the data supports his view.
In January, Pump.fun’s best month to date amid meme coin mania, the launchpad generated $136,743,809 in revenue. Over the past month, according to Dune, the platform has amassed just $26,390,173 in revenue—that’s an 80% decline.
Still, the lifetime numbers Pump.fun boasts are undeniably impressive—perhaps all the more impressive when you consider its humble roots.
The project started as an idea between three crypto degens who wanted to make it easier to create tokens. At the time, the co-founders—Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler, and Noah Tweedale—were working remotely from their laptops.
Within a few months, they started to hire employees—including a senior developer who went rogue—and began working from a WeWork in London. Now, Cohen told Decrypt, Pump.fun has over 70 employees across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
“We don’t have strict boundaries around teams, but we do position employees based on specialties like mobile, livestreaming, chat, infrastructure, etc,” he explained. “No one team is significantly larger than another. When we have a need, we shift members from across multiple teams to focus on single product priorities.”
Throughout its 18-month lifespan, Pump.fun earned the title of the fastest crypto app to hit $100 million in revenue and has since generated more than $774 million, per Dune data. Cohen declined to go into specifics regarding how much of this is considered profit, but he added that “the overwhelming majority of funds are reinvested directly into product development.”
Dmitry Lapidus, Head of APAC at CoinFund, told Decrypt this kind of money places Pump.fun in the top five to 10 largest crypto projects in terms of current revenue. Ahead of it are the likes of Tether, Circle, Ethereum, and Solana itself—core infrastructure components that not only have been around for much longer, but provide the tools for projects like Pump.fun to exist in the first place.
Pump.fun allows anyone to create a token in minutes, if not seconds, without having to pay a dime. Following its launch in January 2024, it quickly became the go-to place for all things meme coins. Before long, startups that wanted their own tokens took to the platform, and livestreams on Pump started to explode—sometimes literally.
The cultural and economic relevance it garnered is what enabled the company to raise $600 million in an ICO in just 12 minutes. The PUMP token soared into the top 65 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization upon launch, but it has since dropped to 84th.
PUMP climbed above a $6 billion valuation, but fell to as low as $4.2 billion on Monday—just a hair above its ICO price. The token is currently down almost 20% over the last seven days, per CoinGecko.
Initial interest in the PUMP token may have been in part spurred by a few rounds of buybacks from the platform—totalling $19.73 million, per Tehc. Degens believe this is the start of the platform sharing its revenue with token holders—an attractive proposition, so long as the platform’s usage and revenue continues to grow. But will it?
“Lately, there hasn't been the same hunger for Pump.fun tokens,” said Tehc.
In its lifetime, Pump.fun has been responsible for the creation of almost 11.9 million tokens. To put that into perspective, Etherscan can only find 1.6 million ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. At its January peak, Pump.fun created 70,576 in a single day. However, according to Tehc’s Dune dashboard, this figure has since fallen to 10,000 to 15,000 a day.
The drop comes as LetsBonk, a rival launchpad led by the community behind the BONK meme coin, has stolen significant market share from Pump.fun. For 14 out of the past 15 days, per Dune, LetsBonk has been responsible for the majority of meme coin launches on Solana. Back in April, Pump.fun was responsible for almost 100% of all launchpad activity on the network.
Over on Myriad, a prediction market developed by Decrypt's parent company Dastan, sentiment among PUMP and BONK crypto traders is reflected in a market that pits the coins against each other. Myriad users currently strongly favor BONK having a larger market cap than PUMP by the end of July. It may have seemed possible for PUMP to flip BONK just after Pump.fun's token launched and the hype was at its peak, but now the coins are separated by more than $1 billion in market cap, with BONK leading the way.
“It’s pretty clear that the same thing that we saw kind of in the NFT cycle, where it starts as this genuine market, then [becomes] very exploited,” Tehc told Decrypt, if reference to Pump.fun losing market share to LetsBonk. “You have more advanced tools. You have more trading bots. You have more people creating all types of token creation bots, sniping bots, all of this stuff,” he said. “It’s just natural.”
Pump.fun has indeed spawned an entire economy of tools underneath it. “Bump bots,” for example, quickly buy and sell a selected token, so it's regularly shown on the Pump.fun homepage. Of course, there is a more sinister side to the underground economy full of rug-pull tools, bundle bots, and more.
Tehc argues trader interest in the platform has waned as a result, and as degens look for platforms with more organic trading behavior in which to invest. He says this is best seen through Pump.fun’s graduation rate dropping from 1.67% in November to as low as 0.58% in May.
“Graduating” refers to when a token hits a pre-defined market cap, currently $66,000, and becomes tradable on Pump.fun’s own decentralized exchange PumpSwap. By graduating, 206,900,000 of the graduating token and 85 SOL are put into the PumpSwap liquidity pool to enable smoother trading.
“Generally, when the graduation rate increases, it means there's more hunger in the trenches,” Tehc explained. “And when it's at the lowest, that is when the trenches are the most fatigued,” he said. “For example, now we see a slightly higher graduation rate on the BONK launch pad, which I think means that people are more hungry to buy BONK tokens than PUMP tokens.”
Cohen, Pump.fun’s founder, believes meme coins will naturally hover around a 1% graduation rate.
“In the world of memecoins—and the market for collectibles more broadly—it’s the ~1% that really matters. Virtually everything else is noise,” Cohen told Decrypt. “Whether it’s meme coins, trading cards, or social media posts, the market mechanism is the same—the magic is in the market’s ability to discern and assign value to the things that are most important.”
The skill of meme coin trading is in selecting that top percentile of projects that are going to succeed, as fleeting as that success may be.
The top trader on Pump.fun, as tracked by Tehc’s Dune dashboard, has realized more than $41 million in profit with a total of 151 wallets profiting more than $1 million. It’s worth noting, however, this dashboard only records pre-graduation buys, and a lot of trading happens post-graduation. Regardless, the data wizard warns that most of these “top traders” aren’t even real people.
“I think the top 50 wallets, on the most profitable page, is 49 bots and one Cupsey,” he said, referring to notorious trader Cupsey. “There are mass deployers, there are sniper bots, volume bots […] mostly it's snipers.”
One of the most profitable strategies, Tehc says, is to launch a token on Pump.fun and rug it within minutes or even seconds. One trader, for example, bagged $840,000 over just three months by spamming 17,000 tokens—each time selling their supply within seconds.
This strategy only became more profitable with the introduction of creator revenue sharing, which gives token deployers a cut of the trading fees associated with a coin. One token creator earned $93,780 in three weeks after the feature was implemented.
“We operate entirely on-chain, and the data you see are the same that we see,” Cohen said. “You have a real-time view into who we are, how we operate, and how we perform. That’s the beauty of life on-chain.”
However, he warned against focusing too heavily on data alone—especially within the company.
“Data are great, but UX means everything,” Cohen said. “You have to build a product that users enjoy and that generates value. Fun and value are reflected in the data," he said. "In that way, data are a secondary driver.”
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