Pump.fun achieved peak revenues in the summer of 2024, sitting on a stack of 687K Solana (SOL). The platformโs team is selling a part of the proceeds, recently sending another tranche of SOL to exchanges.ย
The Pump.fun team has liquidated 254,074 SOL so far, and recently send more than 10K SOL to exchanges. The platform, which has been thriving on constant fee inflows, is also aiming to lock in some of the gains. So far, the platform has reported 687,531 SOL in lifetime revenues.
Roughly, Pump.fun has earned $50 for each unique address that has interacted with the exchange. More than 2M wallets tried the meme coin casino, while the earnings reached $100M.ย
What is even more extraordinary, Pump.fun only took 217 days to reach those revenue levels, getting ahead of all crypto apps so far. In just around six months, Pump.fun achieved the lifetime revenues of the Ethereum Name Service, an older and well-known project, reveal data by Syncacy capital.ย
The platform has faced criticism for its fee-based greed, though it is a relatively small fee producer compared to other protocols. The difference is that Pump.fun gets to retain most of the fees, and has relatively small expenses. Pump.fun has not hinted at launching a native token, or at sharing the revenues with its users in any form.ย
Pump.fun added to a recent SOL price correction
Known wallets belonging to the Pump.fun team have transformed some of the SOL into more than $38M in USDC tokens. The selling happened during times of volatility for SOL, while Pump.fun itself added to the selling pressure. The recent Pump.fun sales happened at average prices of $158 to $157.50.ย
The selling may have added to the downward moves of SOL, which corrected to $129.80. SOL is also down more than 16% since the past week, taking a deeper cut than the rest of the market.ย
The teamโs wallet now contains another 303K SOL, while also still receiving a constant inflow of fees. Pump.fun also indirectly benefits from its activity, by holding staked JitoSOL tokens worth $6.49M. Those tokens pay out a fraction of the JitoSOL validator fees and tips, a necessary expense for fast Solana transactions and especially sniping meme tokens.ย
Pump.fun still has no meaningful competitors
Pump.fun may be trying to cash out relatively fast, as is seen as a short-term phenomenon, soon to lose out to competitors or other trends. As of September 2024, Pump.fun is still the leading platform for raising early liquidity for even the most minor meme token. Of all tokens launched, only a small fraction graduate to trade on Raydium.ย
Livestreams are one of the key features that keeps up engagement on Pump.fun. Since tokens have a very short life cycle, a live stream is usually used to concentrate the price action within a very short time frame. Many tokens spike, then rug pull during the livestream.ย
The Solana ecosystem now has around 100 active tokens, but very few at the top have sufficient liquidity. This, however, has not stopped speculators from trying out every new meme that appears on the platform.ย
Pump.fun further accelerated its usage after removing the $2 launch fee, which is only tapped from the token itself once it accrues liquidity. With virtually zero barriers to entry, Pump.fun has hosted more than 1.9M token launches. Of all launches, less than 27K tokens moved on to trade on Raydium, and even fewer of them survive for the long term. This makes up for a daily success rate of 1.85% for the average token.ย
Despite the slowdown, Pump.fun still has no viable alternative. At an earlier point, Moonshot was taking up some of the meme token traffic, but its activity slowed down to almost nothing. Pump.fun peaked on August 13, with most traders focusing on new tokens to look for the next star. Pump.fun has almost no curation tools to assure quality, and relies on small investments to take risk with as many launches as possible.ย
The other potential competitor for Pump.fun is the TRON-based SunFun. For now, SunFun managed to grab some of the volumes in its early days. After the initial hype, SunFun showed a rapid slowdown of activity, with no organic interest in creating memes.ย
Cryptopolitan reporting by Hristina Vasileva
