“MEME Amusement Park” Pump.fun: Token issuance accounts for over 70% of Solana, with a 3-person team generating over $30 million in revenue
The small team Pump.fun, consisting of only 3 members, generated over $30 million in revenue in less than four months. However, while its popularity is soaring, it is also facing criticism due to user interest being harmed and chaos in live streaming.Author: Nancy, PANews
In the wave of token issuance led by Solana, Pump.fun is undoubtedly a powerful driving force and a big winner. This small team of only three members has generated over $30 million in revenue in less than four months. However, while Pump.fun is gaining popularity, it is also facing criticism due to user interests being harmed and chaotic live streaming.
Captured over $33 million since launch, with active trading pairs accounting for only single digits
According to data from The Block Pro, due to the low entry threshold and the surge in demand for creating popular MEME tokens, approximately 455,000 tokens were created on the Solana blockchain in May this year, far exceeding Base's 177,000 tokens and BNB Chain's 39,000 tokens. Most of the tokens created on Solana are MEME tokens, partly thanks to Pump.fun.
Dune data shows that as of June 4, Pump.fun has captured nearly 203,000 SOL in total revenue since its launch in February, currently valued at approximately $33.468 million, and the number of MEME tokens it has deployed exceeds 832,000, accounting for over 70% of Solana's historical token issuance (over 1.1 million), with an average of over 6,300 tokens launched daily.
Meanwhile, Pump.fun's fees have placed it among the top ten crypto protocols. SolanaFloor pointed out in a tweet at the end of May that in the past 30 days, Pump.fun's monthly revenue surpassed that of Uniswap Labs, briefly becoming the fourth-largest protocol across all blockchain networks. The latest data from DefiLlama shows that in the past 24 hours, Pump.fun ranked eighth with a daily revenue of $1.01 million, surpassing AAVE, PancakeSwap, and Maker.
However, amidst the ongoing token issuance frenzy, the number of actively traded MEME tokens is quite limited. According to statistics from GeckoTerminal, in the past 24 hours, among the top 251 ranked MEME token trading pairs, the total number of trades exceeded 46,000, with a trading volume of approximately $14.793 million. From the perspective of trading volume, there are only 5 trading pairs exceeding $1 million, accounting for just 1.9%; 6 trading pairs between $100,000 and $1 million, accounting for 2.4%; and the remaining 240 pairs are all below $100,000, with the lowest being in single digits. In terms of the number of trades, there are 11 trading pairs with over 1,000 trades, accounting for nearly 4.4% of the total, while the majority of trading pairs (56.9%) have between 100 and 900 trades, and there are 97 trading pairs with fewer than 100 trades. Additionally, in terms of token price increases, 17 trading pairs have increased by over 10%, accounting for nearly 7.2%, with an average increase of 30.9%, indicating limited wealth creation effects; however, only 8 pairs have decreased by over 10%, with an average decline of 24.4%, suggesting that the stable prices of most trading pairs mean "few people are interested."
Risks of MEME "traffic backlash" highlighted, Pump.fun faces multiple challenges
Currently, in addition to the proliferation of tokens with poor quality, Pump.fun is also facing challenges such as real user profits being continuously harmed, becoming a tool for bad actors to make money, and chaotic live streaming.
On one hand, there are increasingly more bot trades on Solana, compressing the profit margins for ordinary users, such as bots front-running and arbitraging. For example, Dune data shows that as of June 4, the bot Bonk Bot on Solana has a trading volume exceeding $6.32 billion and over 358,000 users, Pepe Boost has garnered $3.41 billion and 57,000 users, Trojan has about $3.36 billion and 23,000 users, and Sol Trading Bot has over $2.05 billion and 506,000 users.
On the other hand, Pump.fun's high participation is due to its simplified token issuance process and lowered barriers, but this model has also attracted many "scammers" to rush in. In the past, celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner, Iggy Azalea, and Davido have used Pump.fun to issue MEME tokens for profit (related reading: Celebrity MEME tokens generally drop over 80%, the crypto market says NO to external "scammers"). For instance, according to Lookonchain monitoring, Caitlyn Jenner recently issued a total of 12 Meme tokens, with total profits reaching 2,381 SOL (approximately $405,000). Due to her inability to disguise herself, she transferred all her profits to the same Binance deposit address. The behavior of celebrities issuing tokens has also sparked market dissatisfaction, with crypto analyst Shiller recently calling for celebrities who profit from MEME tokens to stay away from the crypto space, as historically, celebrity-involved crypto projects often fail, leading to a total loss of value. Moreover, some have taken the opportunity to steal the X accounts of crypto KOLs/celebrities to falsely promote MEME tokens.
Additionally, there is a serious phenomenon of project parties controlling the market. For example, according to Lookonchain monitoring, the developer of the MEME token $ZACK purchased a large number of $ZACK tokens at a very low price on Pump.fun. Statistics show that among the top 25 holders, 20 are wallets related to developers, totaling 393.66 million $ZACK, accounting for 41.3% of the supply, valued at over $33 million. The purchase cost was only 29.17 SOL (about $4,400); African pop star Davido created $DAVIDO on the Pump.fun platform and spent 7 SOL (about $1,190) to purchase 20.3% of the token supply. Davido made a profit of 2,783 SOL (about $473,000) within just 11 hours after the launch of $DAVIDO, with unrealized profits at one point reaching $207,000.
Recently, after Pump.fun launched its live streaming feature, it attracted a large number of users. Some users commented, "It took me 10 days on other social platforms to attract 300 live viewers, but it took just 10 minutes here to attract over 400 viewers, and I even added my token to Raydium. Bullish." However, aside from some live streams featuring sleeping or pets to attract investors, due to a lack of regulation and low costs for violations, some have resorted to self-harm or borderline behavior to gain attention and traffic, leading to frequent chaos. For example, a Solana developer took extreme actions during a live stream to promote his Meme token, resulting in third-degree burns, and some MEME issuers have even streamed pornographic and vulgar content to attract retail investors.
In this context, as a "theme park" for MEME issuance, Pump.fun is facing the risk of "traffic backlash" while enjoying the high income and user volume brought by the MEME craze.
