From competing with bonk.fun to conducting and completing one of the largest ICOs in cryptocurrency history, pump.fun's financial performance this year, while not as spectacular as last year, has still been quite successful. To date, pump.fun has spent nearly 1 million SOL (approximately $188 million) in transaction fees to buy back 12.227% of the total supply of $PUMP.
However, the continuous and large-scale buybacks failed to improve the price of pump.fun, and it continued to decline. The actions of pump.fun and its co-founder Alon have increasingly drawn market dissatisfaction. Two days ago, Mario Nawfal, a KOL influencer with over 2.6 million followers, publicly criticized pump.fun on his alternate account:
This is likely the largest public attack on pump.fun by a KOL we've seen to date. Just hours after this tweet, pump.fun announced a $10,000 community grant to each of its six meme tokens, a move that only added fuel to the fire and was mercilessly mocked by its supporters.
In the comments section below this tweet, there are many similar tweets:
"I'll fuck you."
"That's fucking hilarious."
"You make so much money every day, and then only give $10,000 to these Meme coin users who work so hard to build your ecosystem? What can $10,000 do?"
In August of this year, when Pump.fun faced a strong challenge from Bonk.fun, they launched the Glass Full Foundation, spending approximately $1.7 million to purchase some well-performing meme coins within their ecosystem. However, since then, Pump.fun has not invested any real money in meme coins within its ecosystem. About two weeks ago, $neet, the "last survivor" in the Glass Full Foundation's portfolio, fell below the price Pump.fun purchased it at, resulting in a total loss of approximately $1.37 million for the Glass Full Foundation's holdings.
Players who steadfastly sided with pump.fun during the pump.fun vs. bonk.fun battle, and those who hoped pump.fun could shoulder the responsibility of revitalizing the meme market, are understandably disappointed. They wanted pump.fun to focus on building its own ecosystem, instead of jumping from one thing to another—CCM (the live streaming token) and then ICM—ultimately creating a mess.
Despite numerous buybacks, the coin price remained sluggish, and amidst the increasingly depressed player sentiment and disappointment, it gradually came under scrutiny.
In this situation, the Official Twitter Official Twitter of pump.fun and its co-founder Alon inexplicably fell into a long period of silence for about 10 days, without posting a single tweet. They didn't even mention the last Official Twitter pump.fun update, "Mayhem Mode."
Incidentally, "Mayhem Mode" was also an update that was heavily criticized by players. Given the sluggish Solana meme market, the "Mayhem Mode's" lowered token graduation requirements and the mechanism of randomly purchasing tokens for that mode through transaction fees were seen as pump.fun exploiting the market.
The inexplicable silence prompted even the AI aixbt to jump out and fire at pump.fun:
Subsequently, a tweet from Lookonchain sparked rumors in the market that "pump.fun has run away with the money":
This tweet finally brought pump.fun back to life. Sapijiju, co-founder of pump.fun, tweeted that Lookonchain's tweet was completely untrue, and that pump.fun did not cash out any funds, but simply transferred the funds raised in the ICO to different wallets so that the company could use these funds to invest in business development.
This explanation is clearly weak. Pump.fun has only disclosed acquisitions of Kolscan and Padre; the former is a tool for tracking KOL trading profits and losses, and the latter is a trading platform. When announcing the acquisition of Padre, Pump.fun also announced that Padre tokens would no longer be used on the platform and that there were no further plans for the future.
Imagine a Web2 company being acquired, and shareholders, barely two minutes into their celebration, are informed that all their shares are forfeited. This was the cold-blooded tragedy that unfolded that night; those who didn't carefully read the end of the tweet thread were left hanging, while the original $PADRE holders had nowhere to turn for help.
Finally, although the rumors of pump.fun's collapse are currently unfounded panic, and pump.fun has responded, they represent a concentrated expression of market dissatisfaction. If pump.fun is merely a shrewd company, but completely disregards human nature in its calculations, it cannot be called a truly astute strategist.
Of course, it's also possible they've already made enough money and don't care anymore. After all, the airdrop, which was tweeted as "coming soon" on July 9th, hasn't shown any sign of arriving yet. Alon said Q4 would be a glorious quarter, but it turned out to be a cold and messy affair. The lack of transparency in communication and the joke-like community incentives have only increased player resentment.
How can "Trench" say "I love you," pump.fun?
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