First, Circle sought to go public, and then Pump.fun issued coins on the chain.
In the past week, the TGE that the market has paid the most attention to is none other than Pump.fun. This coin issuance event started in June, and continued to ferment amidst expectations and complaints. Until July 12, the coin was finally issued. Although the market has been questioning its valuation of 4 billion US dollars, judging from the data, it is very obvious that investors used their heels to vote. The public offering was quickly sold out within 12 minutes, and some investors even swore on social media because they did not get a chance.
For now, Pump.fun has delivered a relatively satisfactory answer. After going online, the price has been rising steadily, and just today, Pump.fun also used the handling fee to realize the first token repurchase. But can the price of the currency really be maintained? In the minds of many people, this question is still in doubt.
Speaking of the king of applications in this round of bull market, Pump.fun is at the forefront, even if it is not the first. It is no exaggeration to say that the emergence of Pump.fun has successfully brought MEME to a new height. Its concept of fair launch and convenient operation form have completely broken the high threshold of the traditional issuance model. The temptation of establishing a token with only 3 US dollars is still very attractive even when MEME is on the decline.
From the perspective of the mechanism, there is no pre-sale or private placement, and the entire process is priced by smart contracts. There is even a graduation mechanism that automatically creates a liquidity pool on DEX after the market value reaches US$69,000. The fully automatic listing process is widely welcomed by the market, making Pump.fun the strongest money printing machine in this round of the market.
Since its launch in January 2024, Pump.fun has issued 11.44 million tokens in total, with over 22 million addresses in use, and has realized a cumulative revenue of nearly $720 million, with the highest daily handling fee reaching $5.43 million and the peak daily revenue reaching a staggering $15.88 million. It can be basically considered that all the market dividends of this round of MEME have been pocketed by Pump.fun, which has further driven the development of the Solana ecosystem.
It is such a project that started with MEME, and suddenly wanted to issue coins, which triggered widespread heated discussions in the market. The rumors of Pump.fun's coin issuance began in February this year. At that time, Wu said that Pump.fun planned to issue coins on centralized exchanges and even prepared complete coin issuance documents, but later stopped because Trump's family frequently issued MEME, which led to liquidity depletion. In June, the coin issuance rumors made a comeback. Blockworks quoted several insiders as saying that Pump.fun planned to raise $1 billion through token sales, with a valuation of $4 billion. The tokens will be 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 soon. 150 billion tokens will be sold this time, with a unit price of 0.004 USDT, accounting for 15% of the total supply (1 trillion). At a valuation of US$4 billion, it raised US$600 million. Due to compliance reasons, participants from the UK and the United States are not allowed to participate in this sale. In the PUMP token economics, 33% is used for public sale, 24% is used for community and ecological incentives, 20% is allocated to the team, 2.4% is used for ecological funds, 2% belongs to the foundation, 13% is allocated to existing investors, 3% is used for live broadcast related, and 2.6% is used for liquidity and exchanges.
However, compared with the expectations of the previous coin issuance, when the coin was actually issued, the market collectively predicted a negative performance. The controversy focused on the valuation of $4 billion. You should know that the first stablecoin stock Circle, which rang the bell in New York, was valued at only $7 billion. Even for the regular army, an on-chain casino threatened to ask for $4 billion, and the valuation even exceeded most of the current DeFi blue-chip protocols, which made the market say that it was overdrawn liquidity.
More importantly, today is different from the past. From the market point of view, looking at the current currency circle, except for the recent rise of the dragon, the trend of most altcoins and MEME coins can only be described as sluggish. This can be seen from the trading volume. According to Dune data, after reaching a peak of 5.44 million US dollars in trading volume on January 23, 2025, Pump.fun's trading volume basically showed a cliff-like downward trend. The daily trading volume in recent days has basically stabilized within 700,000 US dollars, a drop of 87.2% from the high point, and from the perspective of token creation, the daily token creation has dropped from a peak of 70,000 to 30,000, almost halved. The token graduation rate is even more shockingly low. In 2024, there was a graduation rate of 1.6%, but now, the graduation rate has dropped to less than 1%. It is enough to see that the benefit effect is weakening, the MEME market is becoming "cold", and users' enthusiasm is rapidly fading. However, no matter how powerful Pump.fun is, it is just a tool that needs to rely on the heat of the MEME market, which has also caused the market to question its valuation.
On the other hand, the market is shrinking, while competitors are rising. Pump.fun, which once looked unrivaled in the market, has also encountered pressure recently. Just recently, its BONK-based rival letsbonk.fun has developed rapidly, and has repeatedly ranked first in the number of token launches, surpassing Pump.fun to become the first in market share. Although Pump.fun quickly fought back, the competition between the two is still intense. It has to be admitted that Pump.fun's position as the leader has been threatened.
It is for these reasons that Pump.fun's $4 billion valuation has been severely questioned. After the coin issuance rumors in June, the market's risk aversion was once aroused. The popular MEME coin in the Solana ecosystem has been pulled back on a large scale, and funds have flowed out rapidly. IOSG Ventures partner Jocy even bluntly stated that this ICO is more like an exit from liquidity rather than a long-term development plan. Crypto researcher @rezxbt even pointed out that Pump.fun is staging a thorough "harvest operation."
Interestingly, in March 2024, Alon, the co-founder of Pump.fun, said on social media that every pre-sale is a scam. Coincidentally, Pump.fun just sold it in the form of pre-sale, which was a face-slapping operation on the spot. The token issuance raised 33% of the total supply, with 18% of the private round for institutions and 15% of the public round. All tokens were fully unlocked on the first day of listing.
Judging from the final result, although industry insiders are not optimistic, supporters and institutions obviously do not think so. From the perspective of public offering, in just 12 minutes, PUMP tokens completed a public offering of US$500 million, of which 6 large exchanges including Kraken, Bitget, and Bybit participated in the PUM public offering. According to Dune panel data, the number of wallet addresses participating in the Pump.fun official website pre-sale and completing KYC was 23,959, and the number of wallet addresses that successfully bought was 10,145, with an average subscription amount of US$44,209. 89.7% of the PUMP token pre-sale was completed through the official website, and the total sales of each CEX accounted for only 10.3%. Among the official website pre-sale addresses, small users are the main group, with 5,758 users subscribing to PUMP within US$1,000, and the number of addresses with a subscription amount of more than one million US dollars is 202, which also shows the enthusiastic preference of institutions.
The whole process perfectly illustrates the unique cryptocurrency industry of saying one thing and doing another. Due to some technical problems in the exchange's public sale, it was difficult for users to complete their subscriptions, and even caused many users to express dissatisfaction on social media. At the time, the community also had a lot of controversy about Pump's subsequent performance. On the one hand, some believed that the valuation was too high and it would inevitably collapse after the spotlight effect ended. On the other hand, some believed that Pump, as the most representative product in MEME, had a complete income logic and cognitive foundation and would not easily interfere.
Judging from the current situation, the latter seems to have won temporarily. After the launch of GMGN on July 15, although Pump fell from $0.0065 to $0.0042 in a short period of time, it started to rise after the shock and is now at $0.0066, up 55% from the fundraising price of $0.004. The FDV price also rose from $4 billion to $6.6 billion, bringing a certain wealth effect to the subscribers.
Of course, this part of the increase is also a performance. According to @EmberCN's on-chain analysis, as of 8 am this morning, pump.fun began to use the fee income to repurchase PUMP after issuing the token. In the past 7 hours, the fee income of 187,770 SOL was transferred to the 3vkp...3WTi address, and after purchasing PUMP, the purchased tokens were transferred to the G8Cc...kqjm address for storage. At present, 111,953 SOL (about 1.83 million US dollars) has been used to purchase 3.04 billion PUMPs, with an average price of 0.006 US dollars. Repurchase can support the price, but it is also difficult to escape the suspicion of transferring from one hand to the other. Of course, for the holders, no matter what the purpose is, as long as the market is pulled, it is a good thing in the end.
Whether it is to withdraw liquidity or simply build benefits, the valuation controversy of Pump.fun reflects the current market situation. MEME, which was once famous for its liquidity, is collectively in trouble, and the hot attention economy seems to have gradually become a false proposition. Today, even the most representative applications have to embark on the road of issuing coins, which subtly reveals the signal of the end of the narrative. Where MEME will go 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 value judgment of the attention economy. The rise of the token at least means that the market recognizes its pricing, and the fall of the token will make the public think about the true connotation of the MEME market, which will lead to more selling sentiment. And this may be one of the reasons why Pump adopted a repurchase.
Back to the question in the title, who made money from the Pump.fun token? There is no doubt that the project has made money, and the participants in the public and private offerings have also made money so far, and short-term long investors have also made money, but when can they make money and to what extent can the project maintain the coin price? It is still a big question mark. Some whales have begun to choose to take the money and run. According to Lookonchain monitoring, a whale 8a5nSU spent 5 million USDC through 5 wallets to participate in the PUMP public sale and purchased 1.25 billion PUMPs. 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 reality, the current improvement of the macro market will also have an impact on MEME to a certain extent. Ethereum's narrative is strong, and mainstream tokens led by Ethereum have continued to rise. The direct result is the outbreak of Ethereum blue-chip altcoins. Take ENS as an example. With today's increase of more than 18%, it has set a new high since February this year. In the long run, even if the market uncertainty is slightly stronger today, the foreseeable interest rate cut is already on the way, and the altcoin market may also be expected to usher in a small climax. MEME reflects more of a bipolar trend. High-quality MEME is driven by sector rotation and the remaining MEME liquidity is siphoned, and most of them will appear to be unpopular.
If this path is followed, MEME, which is similar to the lipstick economy and lottery economy in nature, will always exist, but it will no longer be able to stir up the money tide in the market like in 2024.
