Pump.fun is the most special product in this cycle. Since its launch more than 4 months ago, Pump.fun has published over 1.17 million tokens, with cumulative revenue exceeding $50 million. How to understand this figure? Compared to Uniswap, the top traffic product in the previous bull market, Uniswap Labs' annual revenue is estimated to be around $25-30 million.
It can be said that Pump.fun is not a typical Web3 project, without a complex token economic model or DAO governance mechanism, but relying on precise market positioning, Pump.fun has created a stable and profitable business market. Under the dominance of the attention economy, many people will interpret the continued prosperity of the meme coin track as the advantage of short videos over long videos, so in the "era of mass token issuance", can latecomers still get a share? What new tricks will the combination of attention economy and extreme PVP bring to the meme coin gameplay?
The person who burned himself to promote a meme coin is still live streaming
Do you remember the developer who burned himself a month ago to promote his meme coin? Last Thursday, June 27th, he was still live streaming on Twitter.
The developer's name is Mikol. On May 17th, he launched a meme coin called TruthOrDare (DARE) on Pump.fun, which at the time did not have a live streaming function, so he could only post pictures in the comments. Mikol personally demonstrated the "highlights" of the first season, live streaming on Twitch pouring isopropyl alcohol on himself and having his friends shoot fireworks at him. In the exclamations of the fans and the rise of DARE, his body was set on fire, and he was sent to the hospital with third-degree burns all over his body.
The DARE token gained 12 times in value on the day Mikol was burned, and then quickly returned to zero the next day. Mikol's story was reported by the crypto community media Decrypt, attracting a lot of attention. While lying in the ICU, Mikol specially recorded a video to the community, saying he would not give up operations, "You will see a better me."
Launching a meme coin and then expecting it to rise in value through extreme behavior to attract attention is not unique to Mikol. The Solana meme craze has brought in a large number of new crypto users, also spawning many meme coins that are watched by the minute. In addition to Mikol's "burn coin", there were also meme coins named "LIVEWITHMOM" where the issuer live streamed exposing private body parts to "seek investment".
Although the life cycle of these meme coins is extremely short, and few have a market capitalization of over $1 million, the form of linking live streaming with token issuance has allowed many low-income people to find the "wealth code".
A week after this incident, Pump.fun opened up live streaming functionality, and the community's first reaction was to advise token issuers "please don't self-immolate for money".
At the time when Mikol's story attracted community attention, there were many who felt that such behavior was too pathological and contrary to the original intention of crypto. Some even advised Mikol to find a good job after recovering. But after his condition stabilized, Mikol opened a Twitch live stream from the hospital and synchronized it on Pump.fun. As he wished, his comeback live stream helped DARE surge another 15 times.
That rebound only lasted a day, and the DARE price has continued to decline, seemingly lacking further upside momentum. But since then, Mikol has frequently live streamed in bandages, performing stunts like eating raw eggs, swallowing cinnamon powder, and sharing his recovery routine. New members have also joined his "TruthOrDare family", showcasing their "special skills" like eating mustard and chili peppers.
Unless in rare cases, Mikol and his DARE will likely never regain the attention they once had. There are more Mikols on the internet, hoping to gain community attention through sufficiently abstract and shocking performances, so that their meme coins can take off.
Those with inherent high traffic have already entered the token issuance game, from Jenner to Mother and Father, the celebrity coin wave has made the issuance teams and early followers all handsomely rewarded. Although figures like Vitalik have expressed opposition to this phenomenon, it is difficult to stop the "entertainment to death" trend in the crypto community.
Perhaps it can be said that the new entrants in this crypto cycle come from the "lower-tier market". The meme coin market is still huge, but unlike the DOGE, PEPE and other meme coins that had some connection with the crypto community in the past, the current meme coin craze is pointing to a new direction, outside the crypto community and into the lower-tier market.
The crypto market is experiencing a transition from PGC to UGA
There are many realistic reasons behind the emergence of the meme coin craze. Admittedly, the crypto narrative's appeal in this bull market is not as strong as before. Compared to "value coins" with opaque token distribution and grand narratives that fail to land, newcomers are more willing to use meme coins as their first entry point into the crypto world.
Behind this is the growing number of users who have seen through the ultimate PVP logic, no matter how the narrative changes, it is just to create a sufficiently Ponzi-like pool for the next person to take over. The market is not lacking in people who can issue tokens, but those who can tell the token issuance story well. Since the community consensus has become "the essence of value coins is also a kind of air coin", it's straightforward to issue their own tokens. The birth of Pump.fun is timely.
The emergence of Pump.fun allows users to publish their own meme coins at an extremely low cost (0.02 SOL), and meme coins go through the entire process of takeoff and collapse in a few hours, with over 10,000 tokens published on Pump.fun every day, accounting for over 80% of the total Solana ecosystem tokens. Recently, Pump.fun's daily revenue has been between $450,000 and $1 million, and its total revenue has exceeded $50 million since its launch a few months ago.
As pointed out in an analysis report released by Youbi Capital in May, the popularity of low-liquidity assets is an internal response to the current lack of on-chain liquidity in this cycle, and also implies a potential metaphor for the rapid increase in the number of tokens issued due to the transition from PGA (Professional Generated Asset) to UGA (User Generated Asset), leading to increasingly fragmented consensus.
However, new opportunities still exist.
Three days ago, DEX Screener launched a token issuance platform called Moonshot. On the first day of launch, it published over 7,000 tokens. At the same time, Solana was also praised by the community for launching the ability to trade tokens on Twitter, called blinks. Combining these two hot topics, the meme coin SC surged over 100 times in two days, indicating that the market is eager to grab a share of the token issuance platform's cake, and users are also looking forward to new stories after Pump.fun.
After all, crypto technology has unprecedented and greatly reduced the speed and threshold of asset issuance and trading, and its potential application market is still huge. As long as the community's demand for "monetizing attention" remains, the crypto market will still have narratives to tell.
What if live streaming happened in Web3?
In the traditional internet, the "attention economy" industry has developed for about 20 years, going through the transformation from the forum and Tieba era to the text-and-image Weibo era, and then to the short video live streaming era. This trajectory is also being played out in the crypto field.
On May 29, pump.fun announced the launch of a live streaming function on its platform. For a website that makes money from on-chain meme coins, users indeed do not have a demand to watch live streams. However, live streaming, as the form of content dissemination with the largest information capacity, the strongest sense of scene, and the most infectious power, combined with the asset issuance function, is a worthwhile application scenario from the perspective of attention economy.
Simplifying Commercialization to the Extreme
The path to commercialization of Web3 is completely different from the traditional internet, but in the attention economy, the typical cases of Web2 can provide some inspiration for the crypto industry.
Take Kuaishou as an example. In 2013, the less-than-two-year-old Kuaishou decided to transform from a GIF creation tool into an internet community, where users produced content on Kuaishou, recorded and shared their lives and creativity through short videos, and interacted with fans. Unlike emerging platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou's user positioning was the "average person in society", with users mainly being young people in second- and third-tier cities.
In 2014, YY anchors with a loyal fan base in the lower-tier market joined Kuaishou, and at that time, Kuaishou's monthly active users were 1 million. By the end of 2016, Kuaishou's monthly active users had surpassed 64 million, and during these two years of rapid growth, YY system anchors occupied the top four positions on Kuaishou's top anchor list.
Kuaishou maintained the characteristics of the community in the lower-tier market, did not sign up internet celebrity stars, did not support traffic, and the fair algorithm mechanism encouraged the flourishing development of UGC content. Compared to products of the same period, Kuaishou eventually stood out with its unique "decentralized community" model.
In 2017, Kuaishou also took the lead in seizing the dividends of live streaming, becoming the world's largest single live streaming platform. According to Kuaishou's prospectus, from 2017 to 2019, the company's revenue was 8.3 billion, 20.3 billion, and 39.1 billion yuan respectively, of which live streaming revenue was 7.9 billion, 18.6 billion, 31.4 billion, and 17.3 billion yuan, accounting for 95.18%, 91.63%, 80.31%, and 68.38% respectively. It can be seen that live streaming was Kuaishou's core business at the time and its foundation.
After the rapid development, Kuaishou had to adjust its content ecology, after all, traditional Web2 companies all need to undergo a commercial transformation, and in this process, only those content producers with high audience consumption levels, meeting traditional social values, and surviving the fierce competition can be left in the end.
In retrospect, rather than saying that Kuaishou did well in the lower-tier market, it is better to say that Kuaishou targeted the new user market in the attention economy track. And the token issuance platforms facing the crypto newbies do not need to consider "commercial transformation".
Among traditional internet giants, whether content platforms or shopping platforms, they all hope to show users "there are good things worth watching/buying here", because only content recognized and loved by more users has commercial value and can bring profits to the platform. But Pump.fun does not need commercialization, its profit model is extremely simple and pure, it only needs to show "there are enough coins and traders here", as long as there are people trading, Pump.fun can make money.
At present, although Pump.fun has opened up the comment area and live streaming function, users log on to Pump.fun only to complete the buying or selling process, and the discussion of meme coins mainly occurs on Twitter, and meme coin developers who want to live stream will mostly choose platforms like Twitch and Kick for live streaming promotion.
On the Pump.fun interface, users can only choose based on the two indicators of comment volume and token market value. If there is a live streaming column, will "live streaming superstars" emerge on Pump.fun?
Human Nature Game and Regulatory Dilemma
Currently, some meme display platforms have emerged, such as Game.com, which just broke through 7,000 Twitter followers, providing a paid list token service, where users can pay 0.8 SOL to publish their self-issued meme coins on this platform and gain more attention.
The Pump.fun team seems to have no intention of exploring more on the existing services, after all, a small team that has generated revenue of over $40 million in half a year and a stable daily revenue of $600,000 really has no motivation to break the product and innovate the narrative, positioning it as a "tool" is already sufficient.
With more and more newcomers entering the crypto field, perhaps live streaming can become a label for Moonshot and other token issuance platforms as a differentiated strategy.
But the several "x to earn" projects that have been destroyed in the past of Web3 have already shown that even the most ingenious design cannot challenge human nature. On June 13, a user on Pump.fun launched a meme coin themed on a sheep wearing a hat, and also conducted a live stream during the same period. But shortly after the live stream started, while the comment area was still discussing the sheep's movements, the snipers who had bought in at the time of the token launch quickly sold off most of the tokens at the high price, causing the token price to plummet.
After the token crash, the meme coin issuer explained in the comment area that "my token balance has always remained unchanged, which can be verified through Solscan. If I just wanted to make quick money, why would I live stream my sheep but not sell my tokens?"
Not selling may be because the tokens have not yet been listed on Raydium, and until the end, this token did not reach a market value of $60,000. And the issuer never live streamed his sheep again.
In addition, regulatory issues are also something that this type of platform needs to pay attention to. If the live streaming form is combined with asset issuance, there will inevitably be various attempts to gain attention through extreme and vulgar behaviors. When Pump.fun announced the launch of the live streaming function, the community was most concerned about how the platform would review extreme content, and when token issuers release some pornographic or even more extreme inappropriate behavior, whether Pump.fun should intervene to prevent possible criminal acts.
Epilogue
Going back to the meme coin issuers mentioned at the beginning of this article, you can feel the content ecology of traditional internet short video platforms in the early years. After years of development, these platforms have explored highly profitable business models.
As a form of content that provides an "immersive experience", live streaming has broken through the imagination in a way that makes people realize how simple the speed of traffic aggregation can be, and channels such as tipping and live commerce have also given content producers the ability to compete with platform capital to a certain extent.
In the crypto field, the control of the platform is instantly dispersed. And attention is still the core driving force pushing the entire market forward. If live streaming happens in Web3, what kind of story will unfold? Can the ultimate utilization of traffic find a new form of expression in a decentralized environment?
Looking back over the years, in the constant breakdown and reconstruction of consensus, the crypto industry has seen countless projects go from "innovation" to collapse. The emergence of Pump.fun is just the beginning.
Welcome to join the official BlockBeats community:
Telegram subscription group: https://t.me/theblockbeats
Telegram discussion group: https://t.me/BlockBeats_App
Twitter official account: https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia
