Behind the Pump.fun Coin Issuance Craze: Who Profits? Who Catches a Falling Knife?

In the past week, the focus of the crypto market has undoubtedly been on the token issuance of Pump.fun. This highly anticipated TGE has been brewing since June, fermenting amid various expectations and doubts, until it finally settled on July 12. Despite numerous doubts about its $40 billion valuation, the actual data shows that investor enthusiasm remains high. The public offering quota was sold out in just 12 minutes, and many investors expressed their disappointment on social media for not being able to participate.

So far, the performance of Pump.fun has been quite good. After its launch, the token price has shown a steady upward trend, and just today, Pump.fun announced its first token buyback using transaction fees. However, whether the coin price can be maintained at a high level in the long term remains a question in the minds of many.

Looking at the leaders in the application of this bull market, Pump.fun undoubtedly ranks at the forefront. It is no exaggeration to say that the emergence of Pump.fun has taken the development of MEME coins to a new level. Its fair launch concept and convenient operation method have completely broken the high barriers of traditional issuance models. The allure of being able to create a coin for just 3 dollars still maintains a strong appeal even today, when the heat of MEME has somewhat cooled.

From a mechanism design perspective, Pump.fun does not have a pre-sale or private placement phase; the entire process is priced by smart contracts, and even a graduation mechanism has been set up. When the market value reaches $69,000, the system will automatically create a liquidity pool on a decentralized exchange, forming a fully automated coin listing process that is highly favored by the market. This has also made Pump.fun the strongest "money printer" in this round of the market.

Since its launch in January 2024, Pump.fun has issued a total of 11.44 million tokens, with over 22 million active addresses and accumulated revenue nearing $720 million. Among them, the highest daily transaction fee revenue reached $5.43 million, while the peak daily total revenue soared to $15.88 million. It can be said that the market dividends brought by this round of MEME frenzy have been almost entirely captured by Pump.fun, further promoting the development of the Solana ecosystem.

However, a project that started with MEME suddenly announced the issuance of a coin, triggering widespread discussion in the market. Rumors about Pump.fun issuing coins first emerged in February this year, when it was reported that they planned to issue coins on a centralized exchange and had even prepared complete issuance documents. However, this was later put on hold due to the Trump family's frequent issuance of MEME coins leading to market liquidity drying up. By June, rumors of coin issuance resurfaced. Media reports cited multiple informants claiming that Pump.fun plans to raise $1 billion through a token sale, with a valuation of up to $4 billion, and the tokens will be offered to both the public and private investors.

On July 10, Pump.fun finally officially announced that the public sale of the native token PUMP will start on July 12, 2025, at 22:00, and the PUMP airdrop is also coming soon. This sale plans to issue 150 billion coins at a unit price of 0.004 USDT, accounting for 15% of the total supply of (1 trillion coins ). Based on a valuation of 4 billion USD, this financing scale is 600 million USD. Due to compliance reasons, investors from the UK and the US are not allowed to participate in this sale. In the PUMP token economics design, 33% is used for public sale, 24% is for community and ecological incentives, 20% is allocated to the team, 2.4% is for the ecological fund, 2% belongs to the foundation, 13% is allocated to existing investors, 3% is for live streaming related activities, and 2.6% is for liquidity and exchanges.

However, compared to the previous market expectations for issuing coins, when the actual time to issue coins arrived, it faced a wave of collective pessimism. The controversy mainly centered around the $4 billion valuation. It’s worth noting that Circle, the leading stablecoin that just listed on the New York Stock Exchange, has a valuation of only $7 billion. An on-chain "casino" dares to claim a $4 billion valuation, even surpassing most current DeFi blue-chip projects, causing the market to cry out about overdrawn liquidity.

More importantly, the current market environment is no longer what it used to be. Looking at the current cryptocurrency market, apart from a slight rebound in the last few days, the performance of most altcoins and MEME tokens has been quite dismal. This is evident from the trading volume; according to statistics, Pump.fun's trading volume peaked at $5.44 million on January 23, 2025, and has shown a sharp decline since then. Recently, the daily trading volume has stabilized at under $700,000, a drop of up to 87.2% from its peak. In terms of the number of tokens created, the daily creation volume has dropped from a high of 70,000 to about 30,000, nearly halving. The graduation rate of tokens is even more astonishingly low, having once reached a graduation rate of 1.6% in 2024, and now it has fallen below 1%. This shows that the wealth creation effect is waning, the MEME market is gradually cooling down, and user enthusiasm is rapidly fading. No matter how powerful Pump.fun is, it is essentially just a tool that relies on the popularity of the MEME market. This is one of the reasons why the market has raised doubts about its valuation.

On the other hand, as the market shrinks, competitors are rising. Pump.fun, which once dominated the world, is now facing pressure. Recently, the competitor letsbonk.fun, centered around BONK, has developed rapidly, surpassing Pump.fun multiple times in the number of coins issued and briefly topping the market share rankings. Although Pump.fun quickly counterattacked, the competition between the two remains fierce. It must be admitted that Pump.fun's leading position is under threat.

Under the influence of various factors, the $4 billion valuation of Pump.fun has come under severe scrutiny. As soon as the rumors of issuing coin in June surfaced, it triggered risk-averse sentiment in the market, leading to a general pullback of popular MEME tokens within the Solana ecosystem, with funds quickly flowing out. Industry insiders have bluntly stated that this ICO resembles a liquidity exit operation rather than a long-term development plan. Some analysts have even pointed out that Pump.fun is staging a complete "harvesting operation."

Interestingly, as early as March 2024, the co-founder of Pump.fun stated on social media that every presale is a scam. Ironically, Pump.fun chose to issue coins in the form of a presale this time, staging a real-life "slap in the face." This token issuance raised 33% of the total supply, with 18% allocated to the private placement round for institutions and 15% for the public offering round, and all tokens were fully unlocked on the first day of launch.

From the final results, despite the general pessimism among industry insiders, the enthusiasm of supporters and institutions remains strong. In terms of public offerings, the PUMP token completed a public offering quota of $500 million in just 12 minutes. Six large exchanges, including a certain trading platform, participated in the PUMP public offering. According to the data, the number of wallet addresses that participated in the pre-sale on the Pump.fun official website and completed KYC was 23,959, with 10,145 wallet addresses successfully purchasing, and the average subscription amount being $44,209. A total of 89.7% of the PUMP token pre-sale was completed through the official website, while the total amount sold on exchanges accounted for only 10.3%. Among the pre-sale addresses on the official website, small investors are the main group, with 5,758 users subscribing for PUMP within $1,000, while the number of addresses with subscription amounts exceeding $1 million was 202, also reflecting institutional enthusiasm.

The entire process perfectly illustrates the unique "口嫌体正直" of the cryptocurrency circle. Due to technical issues encountered by some exchanges during the public sale process, users found it difficult to complete their subscriptions, which even led to dissatisfaction among multiple users on social media. At that time, there was significant controversy in the community regarding Pump's subsequent performance. One side believed the valuation was too high and that a collapse would surely follow the end of the spotlight effect; the other side argued that Pump, as the most representative product in MEME, has a complete income logic and cognitive basis, and would not easily decline.

At present, the latter seems to have the upper hand. After being listed on a certain trading platform on July 15, Pump briefly fell from $0.0065 to $0.0042, but after some fluctuations, it began to rise again, currently quoted at $0.0066, an increase of 55% compared to the fundraising price of $0.004, and its market value has also risen from $4 billion to $6.6 billion, bringing considerable profits to the subscribers.

Of course, this part of the increase is not without human factors. According to on-chain analysis, as of 8 AM this morning, Pump.fun began to repurchase PUMP using fee income after issuing the coin. In the past 7 hours, 187,770 SOL of fee income was transferred to a specific address, purchased PUMP, and then transferred the acquired tokens to another address for storage. So far, 111,953 SOL(, equivalent to approximately 1.83 million USD), has been used to purchase 3.04 billion PUMP, with an average price of 0.006 USD. Although repurchasing can support the price, it inevitably raises suspicions of a left hand to right hand operation. However, for holders, regardless of the purpose, as long as it can drive up the coin price, it is ultimately a good thing.

Whether it is to exit liquidity or simply to benefit the community, the controversy surrounding the valuation of Pump.fun precisely reflects the current state of the market. The MEME, which used to excel in liquidity, is collectively falling into difficulties, and the once booming attention economy seems to gradually become a pseudo proposition. Up to today, even the most representative applications are embarking on the path to issue coin, subtly indicating that the narrative is about to end. Where MEME will ultimately go, the Pump token serves as a barometer. The market's bets on it will become an effective observation of the value judgment of the attention economy. If the token continues to rise, it at least indicates that the market recognizes its pricing; if the token crashes, people will need to rethink the true connotation of the MEME market, which may trigger more selling sentiment. This may also be one of the reasons Pump chooses to repurchase.

Returning to the title question, who is the winner in the Pump.fun issuing coin? Undoubtedly, the project team is the biggest winner. Participants in both public and private offerings also seem to have made significant profits, and short-term investors have similarly earned a considerable amount. But how long they can profit and how long the project team can maintain the coin price remains a huge unknown. Reports indicate that some large holders have begun to choose to cash out. According to monitoring, one large holder spent 5 million USDC through 5 wallets to participate in the PUMP public sale, purchasing 1.25 billion PUMP, which they sold today at an average price of $0.0067, making a profit of $3.416 million.

On the other hand, looking at the current macro environment, the overall positive market will also influence the development of MEME to some extent. Continuous good news from a certain mainstream public chain has driven mainstream tokens to strengthen, directly promoting the explosion of blue-chip projects within that ecosystem. Taking a certain domain service project as an example, today’s increase exceeded 18%, setting a new high since February of this year. In the long run, although there are still some uncertainties in the current market, the foreseeable interest rate cut policy is already on the way, and the altcoin market may also welcome a small wave of climax. MEME may show a trend of polarization, with high-quality projects benefiting from sector rotation and rising, while other projects may be overlooked due to liquidity being siphoned away.

If this path continues to develop, although MEME projects similar to the lipstick economy and lottery economy will always exist, it will be difficult to create another market frenzy like that in 2024.