Author: BlockBeats
What other native cryptocurrency applications can generate revenue?
When this question comes up, you might instinctively think of stablecoins, CEXs, Perp DEXs, on-chain Pokémon trading cards...
Pump.fun, an app that once enjoyed immense popularity during the meme craze and achieved one of the largest IPOs in cryptocurrency history, is beginning to be easily forgotten. In some conversations, I've even heard questions like:
"Pump.fun is still around? And they're still making money?"
Not only can pump.fun generate revenue, it remains a top "money-printing machine" among crypto-native applications. Statistics from DefiLlama show that pump.fun consistently ranks fourth in revenue across any timeframe, whether it's 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or 1 year, behind only Tether, Circle, and Hyperliquid.
Although various "dog-beating" chat groups are deserted, with many going for days without a single person speaking, pump.fun's daily revenue has still exceeded one million US dollars in the past 7 or 30 days.
Is this real revenue, or is pump.fun fabricating it?
Is the revenue generated by pump.fun real?
First, according to the official revenue dashboard of pump.fun, pump.fun's revenue currently consists of three parts:
- Bonding Curve Revenue: Transaction fee revenue before the new coin graduates; pump.fun charges a 0.95% protocol fee for this part of the transaction.
- Pumpswap Revenue: For new coins that have successfully graduated (migrated to the Pumpswap AMM for trading), a protocol fee of 0.93% is charged on transactions for tokens with a market capitalization of 0-420 SOL.
- Terminal (Padre) Revenue: Pump.fun acquired the trading terminal Padre last October and rebranded it as the multi-chain trading platform Terminal. Since then, the revenue from this trading platform has also been included in Pump.fun's revenue.
- Revenue after deducting referral commissions and transaction rebates
For protocol revenue during the bonding curve phase, the official Solana address used by pump.fun to receive this revenue is CebN5WGQ4jvEPvsVU4EoHEpgzq1VV7AbicfhtW4xC9iM. The bonding curve revenue aggregated to this address is hardcoded in the contract. If fake revenue were generated by transferring funds to this address from external sources, there would definitely be an external address directly invoking the System Program's Transfer instruction. After analyzing the transactions of this address, we did not find any instances of fabricated revenue through simple, external Solana transfers.
In other words, bonding curve revenue does indeed come entirely from the protocol fees charged by actual contract calls.
DefiLlama's pump.fun bonding curve revenue data directly calls the official pump.fun API, which is why we first performed on-chain analysis of the official pump.fun bonding curve revenue address. However, DefiLlama calculates the revenue for Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) by querying Solana on-chain data using Dune SQL, completely independent of the official pump.fun API, ensuring extremely high on-chain objectivity and immutability.
At this point, we've ruled out pump.fun's blatant manipulation of revenue through "external transfers" or "falsified data." However, the possibility remains that they generate fictitious revenue through "self-trading" via bots or internal wallets. Therefore, we must ask further—given the current sluggish cryptocurrency market and the significant decline in Meme coin popularity, is pump.fun's revenue genuine and organic?
In the current market environment, is pump.fun's revenue reasonable?
According to data from the token terminal, in the first quarter of this year, the number of daily active addresses on Solana remained stable between 1.2 million and 2.2 million, while on pump.fun it was approximately 150,000.
Meanwhile, according to data from the pump.fun statistics dashboard on Dune, the average daily number of new token deployments corresponding to these 150,000 addresses is approximately 30,000.
This means that if 30,000 new tokens are deployed daily entirely by different real users, then approximately 20% of active users on pump.fun are issuing new tokens every day. However, according to the paper "Predicting the success of new crypto-tokens: the Pump.fun case" published last month by Giulio Marino et al., from September 1st to October 1st, 2025, a total of 655,770 new tokens were deployed on pump.fun, but the number of addresses deploying these tokens was only 243,123.
The current daily deployment volume of the token is higher than that in September last year:
In the context of the current market environment, this data is rather counterintuitive—while social media suggests that cryptocurrencies are on the verge of collapse, pump.fun is still seeing a significant number of new tokens being deployed every day. Furthermore, the number of active addresses over the past month is approximately 10% higher than in September of last year.
Of pump.fun's millions of dollars in daily revenue, Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) still account for a relatively small portion. For example, on March 18th, Pumpswap and Terminal (Padre) generated approximately $284,000 and $58,000 in revenue, respectively, while bonding curve generated approximately $795,000, about 2.3 times the combined revenue of the former two.
The graduation rate for new tokens has recently reached more than double that of September last year:
Meanwhile, approximately 26,000 new tokens were deployed on pump.fun that day. To achieve a bonding curve revenue of $795,000, a bonding curve trading volume of approximately $83,684,200 (795,000 / 0.95% (the protocol fee rate charged by the bonding curve) is needed. Averaging this across each newly deployed token, each new deployed token needs to contribute an average of approximately $3,218 in trading volume before successfully graduating.
Combining the above data, the average contribution of over $3,000 in trading volume per new token doesn't sound so difficult, but rather quite normal, because pump.fun was still able to achieve this goal last September when the data was lagging behind. If calculated in SOL terms, the SOL earned now is more than last September, only the USD-denominated income has decreased.
However, we still have questions: since August of last year, pump.fun has been using almost all of its daily revenue to buy back $PUMP, and has already bought back over 10% of the total supply and over 30% of the current circulating supply of $PUMP. Why then is the price of $PUMP ($PUMP) constantly falling? Although on-chain data shows that the more than $300 million worth of $PUMP that pump.fun has bought back remains untouched in wallets, is it possible that they are creating fake revenue through wash trading, secretly selling off their holdings through dispersed addresses while simultaneously "buying back"?
Where did $PUMP go?
Let's take a look at the token release plan for $PUMP:
As of now, the circulation status of $PUMP is as follows:
- ICO: 33%, fully unlocked by TGE
- Team: 20%, still locked
- Investors: 13%, still locked up
- LP and Exchanges: 2.6%, fully unlocked at TGE.
- Ecosystem Fund: 2.4%, fully unlocked by TGE.
- Live streaming support: 3%, fully unlocked during TGE.
- Foundation: 2%, fully unlocked by TGE
- Community and Ecosystem Incentives: 24%, approximately 50% unlocked during TGE, with the remaining portion unlocking linearly over one year; currently, 65.27% of this portion has been unlocked.
The multisignature escrow wallet with address Cfq1ts1iFr1eUWWBm8eFxUzm5R3YA3UvMZznwiShbgZt currently holds approximately 36.5% of the total $PUMP supply.
This doesn't align with the token release plan for $PUMP. We can be certain that after TGE, all $PUMP tokens were transferred to a multi-signature escrow wallet for distribution. Theoretically, the maximum transferable quantity is only about 58.67% of the total supply (ICO 33% + LPs and exchanges 2.6% + ecosystem fund 2.4% + live streaming support 3% + foundation 2% + approximately 15.67% of unlocked community and ecosystem incentives). Therefore, the balance of $PUMP in the multi-signature escrow wallet should not be less than approximately 41.33%, a difference of approximately 4.83%.
Where did that 4.83% go? We don't know. We don't even know where $PUMP, which has a clearly defined purpose in its description, is located, aside from the ICO sales and distribution. Although, based on on-chain data comparison, we did find that $PUMP, accounting for approximately 24% of the total supply, has remained silent for a long time after large transfers to various addresses, roughly corresponding to the portion outside of the ICO sales and distribution, pump.fun has never disclosed the addresses corresponding to the storage of funds in each wallet.
In particular, regarding community and ecosystem incentives, the only publicly known community and ecosystem incentive activities are Glass Full Foundation (which purchased approximately $1.7 million worth of meme coins within the pump.fun ecosystem), grants of $10,000 each to six meme coin communities totaling $60,000, and hackathons that funded 12 projects with $250,000 each, totaling $3 million, but only six winning projects have been announced so far.
However, this part is already the clearest...
Even with this transparency issue, and even if 4.83% was secretly sold off, the large-scale buyback by pump.fun, which accounts for over 10% of the total supply and over 30% of the current circulating supply, should have offset this selling pressure. So why is the price of $PUMP still so sluggish?
The possible reason is that $PUMP simply doesn't have enough buying interest, and large-scale buybacks are like throwing a stone into the sea without market recognition.
An unrecognized "casino"
When discussing Hyperliquid, we acknowledge its leading position and narrative potential within the Perp DEX, but the meme coin track of pump.fun is widely considered a scam and unsustainable, even by retail investors.
We acknowledged the authenticity of pump.fun's revenue earlier in the article; now we need to look at some other data. This data demonstrates that the negative perception of Meme Coin is not merely a simple emotional aversion among retail investors experiencing its dramatic fluctuations, but rather a rational resistance from institutional investors.
Back in April of last year, research by Medallion Analytics showed that over a 180-day statistical period, approximately 178,000 deployers launched multiple tokens, with 85.3% of these deployers being profitable. In those 180 days, these deployers launched a total of approximately 3.59 million tokens, with profitable deployers launching approximately 3.07 million of them, representing about 85.5%.
During the statistical period, the top 10 most profitable deployers earned approximately 365,000 SOL, while the 10 deployers with average profitability only earned 47.3 SOL, a difference of approximately 7,720 times. For top deployers, the average interval between new token issuances was only 0.11 hours, while for average deployers it was as long as 10.96 hours.
Solidus Labs studied the performance of newly deployed tokens on pump.fun from January 2024 to March 2025. The analysis indicated that a staggering 98.6% of the tokens were pump-and-dump scams.
The issuance of meme coins is no longer a competition of creativity, but rather an assembly-line process of issuing tokens for profit. Top-tier operators, after making rapid profits in extremely short periods, are able to invest their funds in facilities for automated token issuance, making their harvest even faster.
Pump.fun's ability to launch new meme coins on Solana at a cost of $2 or less is indeed a technological advancement, but they haven't guided the meme coin market in a positive direction or convinced retail and institutional investors that meme coins are truly a cultural or even belief asset. Their attempts to expand into live streaming coins, ICM coins, and more recently, AI Agent coins, have all failed.
The data is there, and the money they make most of still comes from providing "low-cost harvesting tools," much like a casino taking a cut.
For pump.fun, deployers can reliably earn a 0.95% risk-free return for every new coin issued and every fake volume generated before the token's market graduation. If you want greater token exposure, you need to generate even more volume to provide more revenue for pump.fun. The funds and revenue within this ecosystem are real, but the ecosystem itself is not organic, and retail investors are the ones who suffer. For institutional investors, such an ecosystem lacks a healthy and sustainable long-term foundation, which may be the root cause of pump.fun's depressed price.
Finally, we have one more question:
Since pump.fun's buybacks have failed to boost the price of the token, wouldn't it be better to use the daily revenue as staking rewards than to continue with the buybacks?
Maybe so, or maybe they don't care anymore.
