Decrypt’s 2024 Project of the Year: Solana Meme Machine Pump.fun – Decrypt

It started on a whim. Two devs, a laptop, and an idea to develop a platform for launching crypto tokens fairly, cheaply, and easily—all while minimizing the risk of scams.

The product wasn’t perfect—far from it. And after launching in January, it arguably led to more crypto scams than would have existed without it; they just looked different. But by the end of the year, the Solana meme coin launchpad Pump.fun had become undeniably the most culturally significant crypto project of the year. Maybe of the last several years.

For better or worse, Pump.fun has lowered the barrier to entry in crypto. It’s made it so anyone and everyone can create a new meme coin—a token which derives its value from perceived cultural meaning, attention, and lulz. The platform is responsible for the creation of over 4.7 million new tokens this year alone, generated over $317 million in revenue, and has accounted for over 60% of all decentralized exchange transactions on the Solana network for the past three months.

“I think meme coins are somewhat inevitable, but I don’t think they would have been able to blow up without Pump.fun,” the project’s pseudonymous co-founder Alon told Decrypt. “I think without that innovation of really permissionlessly and super frictionlessly creating coins, we wouldn’t be here today.”

Though Pump.fun was not the first “no-code” token launchpad in crypto, it is the first to catch on in a big way. And that’s had at least two significant outcomes for the industry this year: an explosion of meme coin trading unlike anything before in crypto’s short history, and a realignment of the on-chain economy.

Ethereum, once the dominant network for all decentralized, tokenized things since launching in 2015, has given way to Solana, a rival network which launched in 2020. But it hasn’t been without considerable controversy along the way.

Critics decry the platform as emblematic of the worst of crypto, and regulators are now starting to pay closer attention as well. 

You could argue, though, that Pump.fun has served as an unfiltered mirror of the crypto community as a whole this year—all of its ambitions and anxieties. A contentious U.S. election, fears of war and global unrest, and endless degeneracy—there’s a meme coin for it all. It set crypto culture ablaze in 2024, at times even literally, and was responsible for some of the industry’s wildest moments. For these reasons and more, Pump.fun is Decrypt’s project of the year.

“We really contributed to empowering [degen] culture,” Alon said. “This is what the product is built for, to a certain extent. It’s to capture these crazy moments, and be a moment in history. We want to be a part of that.”

Meme coin revolution

Pump.fun’s appeal is simple: It’s made it easier to create a crypto token than ever before, redefining the meaning of the word “developer”—or “dev”—in the process. Creating a new cryptocurrency is no longer the domain of the technocratic elite, sophisticated programmers with years of coding experience and deep pockets. Anyone can do it. 

Your grandma can launch a coin. Your teenage son can create a token. And many of them have.

There are now tens of thousands of new tokens launched on Pump.fun every day, which means tens of thousands of more opportunities for crypto traders young and old to try to make money. And that’s largely what drives demand for the product: the age-old desire to get rich quick.

Whether it’s a lucky trader turning a few dollars into millions, screenshots of crypto wallets posting mindbending monthly profits, or young teens pulling in thousands in SOL on an average morning before school, it’s all been made possible because of Pump.fun.

In this sense, the product maps neatly onto what pundits and academics have long described as the onset of “financial nihilism”—the latest wave in the slow disillusionment, primarily among young people, of the American Dream. The term gained popularity following the GameStop meme stock craze on Robinhood in late 2020, and essentially describes the growing sense that it’s no longer possible to generate wealth the old-fashioned way. The system is rigged, all value is subjective, so might as well take your chances with memes—so the idea goes.

If that’s the case, it could help explain why young people are so drawn to the endless churn of meme coins. The trouble is the odds of hitting it big on a meme coin trade are still extremely slim, close to 99% of tokens go to zero, and insider trading still runs amok—not to mention the countless outright scams and rug pulls. But that hasn’t stopped crypto traders from dreaming, and as they rushed to Pump.fun this year in search of the next 1000X, their attention became tokenized.

When the world swooned over a baby hippo, Moo Deng, Pump.fun traders turned it into one of the biggest meme coins of the year. When news broke of Donald Trump getting shot, or a celebrity died, or the U.S. election took a turn, there was a meme coin for it all within seconds. Meme coins are created so quickly on Pump.fun following cultural events, some degens now boast of getting their news primarily from the platform’s front page.

As pop culture became financialized, Gen Z joined in on the fun—perhaps most notably when the viral TikTok meme “Chill Guy” was turned into a Pump.fun token last month and soared to a market cap in the hundreds of millions within days. The frenzy marked payment service company MoonPay’s single biggest day for Solana transactions, a sign of the times.

A product like Pump.fun could not exist on the Ethereum network, which is comparatively slower and more expensive to use, especially when network activity spikes. It’s largely considered more secure than Solana, but that appears to matter very little to the hordes of degens looking to trade memes. Pump.fun clones have been attempted on Ethereum-based layer-2 networks such as Base, which more closely match Solana’s speed and cost efficiency, but have yet to garner the same kind of attention.

As a result, Solana is now suddenly the go-to place for all things crypto—both culturally and financially. In September, Solana surpassed Ethereum in daily decentralized exchange volume and has been ahead ever since—now with a comfortable $2.3 billion lead, according to Dune data. 

And since Pump.fun accounts for more than 60% of all Solana transactions over the past three months, it’s safe to say that Solana’s comeback this year—suffering reputationally and its native token SOL losing 97% of its value in the wake of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried’s implosion—likely isn’t possible without Pump and its many, many memes.

How it began

But it wasn’t always like this. Way back in January, Pump.fun’s pseudonymous co-founders Alon and Sapijiju were on a cold streak of launching products—like an influencer fundraising tool and a self-described “dumb” project on top of crypto-based social network Friend.tech—that didn’t gain much traction. 

After noticing too many rug pulls and dodgy pre-sale token launches, the pair of trench warriors decided to fix the problem. They created a product that would let anyone launch a token for just a few bucks (eventually making it completely free), not allowing for malicious contracts or nefarious pre-sales, promising every token to be a “fair launch.” 

All you have to do is fill in your token’s desired name, ticker, description, attach a photo, and, if you’d like, add social media links. There’s no account creation process or ID checks, like most things in DeFi—just connect your Solana wallet and off you go. Pump then naturally takes a cut of all trades on its platform, which is how it makes its money.

That said, with the token creation process becoming standardized, scams had to evolve and become more sophisticated. 

Now, malicious actors are hacking celebs‘ social media accounts, or buying up huge portions of the initial token supply from side wallets at launch to dump on unsuspecting degens. Entire underground economies have spawned to scam people on Pump.fun—bundle tools, rug pull professionals, comment bots, and more. Degens may no longer have to worry about compromised smart contracts, or sending SOL to a pre-sale wallet and wonder if they’ll actually get any tokens back in return, but trading meme coins is still certainly not safe. 

“We never really mapped the market, to be honest,” Alon told Decrypt. “We were mainly thinking about solving this problem. And were just really deep in the trenches, trying to make it happen.”

There was no grand opening for Pump.fun, not even a beer cracked between friends. It was simply launched off a laptop, with the two founders not even in the same room and without much thought given to what would happen next.

On its first day, Pump generated a modest $7,000 in volume—but even that surprised its creators, Alon said, and opened their eyes to the project’s potential. “In a matter of weeks, every single coin on Solana shall launch on Pump,” the Pump X account tweeted at the time. The duo then knuckled down and improved its “kinda shit” site, Alon explained, as their conviction started to grow.

Alon claims to have DM’d over 3,000 people from across the industry in the early days. It’s become a running joke when people in crypto discover an ignored message from the founder. 

You could hardly blame them though. Most people in crypto ignored Pump.fun in the early going, as tokens launched on the platform back then were generally dismissed as low value and not worth traders’ time. 

That all changed in February when crypto influencer Ansem, who gained notoriety earlier this year for calling the Solana comeback, shouted out a Pump meme coin called Rosebot (ROSE), which then soared to $2.5 million market cap in just 12 hours. It might not sound like much, but it was “huge” at the time, says Alon. Other influencers then followed suit in March.

“Every day after that day we doubled in volume, or something,” Alon told Decrypt. “I know for a fact that the only way they would have heard about us is through organic channels. I definitely [attribute] our success to that organic stuff and really speaking to people.”

Pump.fun then grew, and grew, and grew. The meme coin Shark Cat launched on Pump in late March, hitting a $387 million market cap by the end of the month—then Teh Epik Duck, then Michi, then Mini, and so on. Each one a massive success in its own right.

“Pump.fun changed the game,” pseudonymous trader and Shark Cat deployer 0xWinged, who also has the most followed profile on Pump.fun, told Decrypt. “It became a close knit community of degens who would ape sub $10,000 market cap shitters, as opposed to traditional meme coins like DOGE.”

Before long, celebrities and pop culture icons would take notice of Pump and join the fun. Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner shocked crypto industry observers when, in May, she created a token on Pump.fun with the help of celebrity wrangler Sahil Arora.

Arora went on to launch countless tokens on the platform for the likes of R&B singer Jason Derulo as well as rappers Lil Pump and Rich the Kid—all of whom claimed to have been scammed by Arora.

Suddenly the platform was brimming with funny memes, goofy performance art stunts, and big celebrities like Iggy Azalea pushing the platform forward. But by the end of the month, a dark cloud cast a shadow over the launchpad.

Is Pump still fun?

The so-called livestreaming meta marked another turning point for the platform. Pump.fun token deployers started livestreaming on third-party sites in early May to pump their tokens. It started with a young mom who livestreamed on Kick and promised to perform sexual acts if her son’s meme coin “LiveMom” hit specific market cap milestones. The stunt didn’t last long, and the pair then ghosted. 

It was, again, shocking—valuable currency in the attention economy. And it only seemed to encourage others to push the envelope further.

Later that same month, a Pump.fun dev doused himself in isopropyl alcohol while livestreaming and had fireworks shot at him, instantly going up in flames. The dev, Mikol, was rushed to hospital with third degree burns across 30% of his body, later enduring months of rehabilitation.

“Unfortunately, when you combine the attention economy with the degeneracy of 4chan and crypto, you get a very unpredictable landscape of people willing to do literally anything to garner more attention,” Richard Podgurski, who claims to have been the first person to create a livestream token with LiveTwitch, told Decrypt.

Pump.fun leaned into it, quickly adding a native livestream feature to its platform and establishing it where the the fringes of society gathered to create and comment on culture—4chan with meme coins.

And in typical 4chan fashion—where posting is anonymous and just about anything goes—the lines between what was real and what was not soon became blurred. The vibe shifted. Things got dark. More socially conscious degens began questioning whether things were getting out of hand. All the while, Pump.fun’s revenue figures kept soaring.

It was around this time that a disgruntled Pump.fun employee, Jarett Dunn (also known as Stacc), hacked the platform, draining it of around $2 million worth of funds. Dunn initially claimed to have acted as a whitehat, of sorts, and aimed to “kill” Pump for the harm he believed it was causing. 

Beyond the immediate financial hit that Pump suffered, the reputational damage that came with the hack would prove costly, even if just temporarily. According to a statement from a Pump.fun co-founder in a police report obtained by Decrypt, the company failed to close a $20 million funding round as a result of the hack, due to concerns with company management. 

Court documents associated with the charges against Dunn would also reveal that Pump.fun is tied to Baton Corporation Limited, a company registered in the United Kingdom, which would later become very relevant. Pump.fun cofounders, however, dispute that the company is registered in the U.K. “Pump.fun never was and is still not a U.K. company,” the pseudonymous Sapijiju told Decrypt.

In the months that followed the hack, the stunts on Pump would only escalate, with the company’s daily revenue gains marking highs of more than $5 million by November. Over just a week period in November, users on the platform livestreamed themselves harming animals, recklessly firing of guns, and one even faked a suicide. That was the tipping point. Things had indeed gotten out of hand, even for Pump.fun, which responded by shutting down its livestream feature.

Still, the attention economy cuts both ways, and earlier this month the Financial Conduct Authority in the U.K. issued a warning against the platform. In response, the team decided to geo-fence the platform, restricting access from those in the UK. Experts claim this could be just the start of the legal troubles for the platform. 

“Pump.fun must brace for potential legal liabilities tied to its content moderation under Section 230 CDA, including civil lawsuits from harmed users,” said Cyber Attorney and Reputation Management Consultant Andrew Rossow. “It also faces risks of potential criminal investigations for wire fraud and potential violations of the U.S. Securities Act and EU data regulations.”

That sounds like a lot for a couple trench warriors who had no idea what they’d be getting into just 11 months ago. But it comes with the territory. As Pump.fun grows, so too will the risks and responsibilities.

Where does it go from here? Critics will say it’s unsustainable. The music will eventually stop. But, for now, if 2024 has taught degens anything, it’s that you’ve gotta respect the Pump.