Pump.fun Who made a fortune when coins were issued?
Author: Gyro Finance
In the past week, the most focused TGE in the market has been none other than Pump.fun. This coin issuance event began in June, and continued to ferment in anticipation and spitting, until July 12, when the coin was finally issued. Although the market has questioned its valuation of $4 billion, it is clear from the data that investors are heeling tickets, and the public offering was quickly sold out within 12 minutes, and there are even investors who have exploded on social media because they did not catch it.
For now, Pump.fun has delivered a relatively satisfactory answer. After the launch, the price has been steadily rising, and today, Pump.fun also achieved an initial coin repurchase with fees. But can the price really hold? In the minds of many people, this question is still questionable.
Speaking of the king of applications in this round of bull market, Pump.fun is at the top if not in the first place. It is no exaggeration to say that the emergence of Pump.fun has successfully brought MEME to a new height, and its concept of fair launch and convenient operation form have completely broken the high threshold of the traditional issuance model, and the temptation to build a token with only $3 is still extremely attractive even when MEME is going downhill.
From the perspective of mechanism, there is no pre-sale and private placement, the whole process of smart contract pricing, and even a graduation mechanism is set up to automatically create a liquidity pool on the DEX after the market value reaches $69,000, just like the fully automated listing process is widely welcomed by the market, and it also makes Pump.fun the strongest money printing machine in this round of the market.
Since its launch in January 2024, the total number of tokens issued by Pump.fun has reached 11.44 million, the number of addresses used has exceeded 22 million, and the cumulative revenue has reached nearly $720 million, of which the highest single-day fee has even reached $5.43 million, and the single-day revenue peak has even reached a staggering $15.88 million. Basically, it can be considered that the market dividends of this round of MEME have all been pocketed by Pump.fun, which has further driven the development of the Solana ecosystem.
It was such a project that started with MEME and suddenly wanted to issue coins, which caused widespread heated discussions in the market. Pump.fun coin issuance rumors began in February this year, when Wu said that Pump.fun planned to issue coins on centralized exchanges, and even prepared a complete coin issuance document, but then gave up due to the frequent MEME issuance by the Trump family, which led to the drying up of liquidity. In June, rumors of a coin launch made a comeback, with Blockworks, citing multiple people familiar with the matter, reporting that Pump.fun plans to raise $1 billion through a token sale at a valuation of $4 billion, with the token being sold to the public and private investors.
On July 10, Pump.fun finally released the news, announcing that it will officially launch the public sale of the native token PUMP at 22:00 on July 12, 2025, and the PUMP airdrop is coming. This time, 150 billion tokens will be sold at a unit price of 0.004 USDT, accounting for 15% of the total supply (1 trillion). $600 million raised at a $4 billion valuation. For compliance reasons, UK and US participants are not allowed to participate in this sale. On the PUMP tokenomics, 33% is used for public sale, 24% for community and ecological incentives, 20% for teams, 2.4% for ecological funds, 2% for foundations, 13% for existing investors, 3% for live streaming, and 2.6% for liquidity and exchanges.
However, compared with the previous expectations of issuing coins, when the coins were really issued, they were collectively sung down by the market. The controversy focuses on a valuation of $4 billion, you know, the last stablecoin to ring the bell in New York, Circle, was only valued at $7 billion, and the regular army is still like this, but an on-chain casino threatens to ask for $4 billion, and even surpasses the valuation of most DeFi blue-chip protocols today, making the market bluntly overdraft liquidity.
More importantly, this is not the same as it used to be. From the perspective of the market, looking at today's currency circle, except for the two days when the dragon has risen, the trend of most altcoins and MEME coins can only be described as sluggish. According to Dune's data, after reaching a peak of $5.44 million in trading volume on January 23, 2025, the trading volume of Pump.fun has basically shown a cliff-like downward trend, and the daily trading volume has basically stabilized within $700,000 in recent days, down 87.2% from the high, and from the perspective of token creation, the single-day token creation has dropped from a peak of 70,000 to 30,000, almost halved. The graduation rate of tokens is even lower, with a graduation rate of 1.6% in 2024, but now it is below 1%. It is enough to see that the benefit effect is weakening, the MEME market is becoming "cold", and the enthusiasm of users is also fading rapidly. However, no matter how powerful Pump.fun is, it is only a tool, and it needs to be backed by the popularity of the MEME market, which also makes the market question its valuation.
On the other hand, the market is shrinking, and competitors are rising. Pump.fun, which used to be invincible in the market, has also been under pressure recently. Just recently, the rival letsbonk.fun with BONK as the main body has developed rapidly, during which it has occupied the first place in the number of token launches many times, beating Pump.fun to the first place in market share, although Pump.fun quickly counterattacked, but the competition between the two is still anxious, and I have to admit that the position of Pump.fun Longyi has been threatened.
It is for various reasons that the valuation of Pump.fun of $4 billion has been severely questioned, and after the rumors of the coin issuance in June, the market was once inspired by risk aversion, and the popular MEME coins in the Solana ecosystem have pulled back in a large area, and funds have flowed out rapidly. IOSG Ventures partner Jocy even bluntly said that the ICO is more like an exit from liquidity than a long-term development plan, and crypto researcher @rezxbt pointed out that Pump.fun is staging a complete "harvest operation".
Interestingly, in March 2024, Alon, the co-founder of Pump.fun, said on social media that every time, the presale was a scam. Coincidentally, Pump.fun happened to be on sale in the form of pre-sale, and the face-slapping operation was performed on the spot. The token offering raises 33% of the total supply, with 18% of the private round for institutions and 15% of the public round, and all tokens are fully unlocked on the first day of listing.
Judging from the final results, although the industry is not optimistic, supporters and institutions obviously do not see it that way. According to Dune panel data, the number of wallet addresses participating in the pre-sale on the Pump.fun official website and completing KYC was 23,959, and the number of wallet addresses that successfully bought was 10,145, with an average subscription amount of $44,209. 89.7% of the PUMP token presale was completed through the official website, and only 10.3% of the total sales of each CEX were sold. Among the pre-sale addresses on the official website, small users are the main group, with 5,758 users subscribing to PUMP within $1,000, while the number of addresses subscribing for more than $1 million is 202, which also shows the enthusiastic preference of institutions.
The whole process perfectly interprets the unique integrity of the currency circle, due to some technical problems in the public sale of the exchange, it is difficult for users to complete the subscription, and even many users are dissatisfied on social media. At that time, there was also a great controversy in the community about the follow-up performance of Pump, on the one hand, it was believed that the valuation was too high and it would inevitably collapse after the spotlight effect ended, and on the other hand, it believed that Pump, as the most representative product in MEME, had a complete revenue logic and cognitive foundation, and would not be easily inserted.
Judging by this stage alone, the latter seems to have won for the time being. After the GMGN was launched on July 15, Pump fell from $0.0065 to $0.0042 for a short time, but after the shock, it started an upward trend and is now trading at $0.0066, an increase of 55% compared to the fundraising price of $0.004, and the FDV price has also risen from $4 billion to $6.6 billion, bringing a certain wealth effect to subscribers.
According to @EmberCN's on-chain analysis, as of 8 a.m. this morning, pump.fun began to buy back PUMP with fee income after the coin. In the last 7 hours, 187770 SOL of fee income has been transferred to 3vkp... 3WTi address, buy it into PUMP and then transfer the purchased token to G8Cc... kqjm address. So far, 3.04 billion PUMPS have been purchased using 111,953 SOL (about 1.83 million US dollars) at an average price of 0.006 US dollars. Buybacks can support prices, but it is also difficult to escape the suspicion of left-handed to right-handed, of course, for holders, no matter what the purpose, as long as the market is pulled, it is a good thing.
Whether it is to exit liquidity or simply build for the benefit of the Pump.fun, this valuation controversy reflects the current market situation, MEME, which was once known for its liquidity, is collectively entering a predicament, and the explosive attention economy seems to have gradually become a false proposition. Up to now, even the most representative applications have to embark on the road of coin issuance, faintly revealing the signal of the end of the narrative. In the end, the token Pump is a weather vane, and the market's bet on it will be an effective observation of the market's judgment on the value of attention economy. The price of the token is rising, at least the market agrees with its pricing, and when the token falls, the public will have to think about the true meaning of the MEME market, and there will be more selling. And this may be one of the reasons why Pump has taken a buyback.
Back to the question of the title, Pump.fun issue coins, who exactly earns it? There is no doubt that the project party has earned, the participants in the public and private offerings have also made money, and the investors who have been long in the short term have also earned, but it is still a big question mark when it can earn and to what extent the project can maintain the currency price. According to Lookonchain monitoring, a whale 8a5nSU spent 5 million USDC to participate in the public sale of PUMP through 5 wallets, and purchased 1.25 billion PUMP, and today it sold all of them at an average price of $0.0067, with a profit of $3.416 million.
On the other hand, returning to the real background, the current improvement of the macro market will also have an impact on MEME to a certain extent. The Ethereum narrative is strong, and mainstream tokens led by Ethereum have also continued to rise, and the direct result is the explosion of Ethereum blue-chip copycats, with ENS as an example, rising more than 18% today, hitting a new high since February this year. In the long run, even if the market uncertainty is a little stronger, the foreseeable interest rate cut is already on the way, and the copycat market may also be expected to usher in a small climax. MEME is more of a bipolar trend, with high-quality MEME rising by sector rotation, and remaining MEME liquidity being siphoned, and most of them will show a situation where no one cares.
If this is the case, MEMEs similar in nature to the lipstick economy and lottery economy will always exist, but it will be difficult to stir up the money tide in the market like 2024.