Pump.fun, the memecoin launchpad that took the crypto industry by storm last year, has lost its dominance amid rising competition and criticism from its users.
The platform’s revenue came in at under $300,000 on Monday, according to DefiLlama data. Its revenue has fallen below that amount on only two other days in the past 12 months, both of them in September 2024.
The shift raises questions about whether Pump.fun can regain its footing amid a memecoin slump and an increasingly crowded market.
Pump.fun launched in 2024 and quickly became one of the most talked-about projects in crypto. As of Tuesday, it has earned more than $730 million in cumulative revenue.
However, it has faced harsh criticism for fuelling rampant speculation in which many retail investors are left holding the bag.
Pump.fun allows anyone to create a token for less than $2 on Solana. The first project of this kind, it led to an influx of new tokens entering the blockchain, including many of the largest memecoins.
Most notably, Fartcoin reached a market value of over $2 billion in January, though it has since slid to a value of about $1 billion.
For most of the first half of the year, Pump.fun accounted for roughly 90% of all new token launches on Solana, according to Dune data.
Established projects like Raydium and Jupiter launched their own token launchpads. But they failed to put a dent in Pump.fun’s market share.
That changed on July 6, when LetsBonk became the first launchpad to pass Pump.fun in market share. That day, LetsBonk accounted for 58% of all token launches.
LetsBonk has continued to grow: On Monday, three out of every four tokens on Solana were launched via LetsBonk. Only 15% of tokens were launched via Pump.fun.
The upstart has dominated other metrics as well.
In the past 24 hours, LetsBonk accounted for $163 million in volume, about 800% more than Pump.fun. LetsBonk brought in about $1.3 million in fees, while Pump.fun received just over $200,000.
Launches on LetsBonk have also been more successful, with 240 tokens “graduating” in the past 24 hours. In that span, Pump.fun had just 34 graduates.
On token launchpads like Pump.fun and LetsBonk, a newly launched memecoin graduates when it raises enough Solana on its bonding curve to be listed on a decentralised exchange.
Recent actions
Pump.fun’s recent actions have also led to criticism.
In November, Pump.fun killed a livestream feature designed to let creators promote their memecoins in real time. It became a magnet for chaos, as users performed stunts, threatened pets, and even staged suicide attempts in a bid to pump their tokens’ value.
On July 12, Pump.fun raised $500 million in just 12 minutes in an initial coin offering. The team had also raised an additional $720 million by selling PUMP tokens to private investors, many of whom sold their holdings once the token began trading.
“The ‘Institutional round’ sucked all demand out from secondary [markets] and just left the market with relentless supply to dump,” McKenna, a pseudonymous partner at venture firm Arete Capital, said on X.
On July 23, Pump.fun co-founder Alon Cohen said that the anticipated airdrop “will not be taking place in the immediate future.” Within 24 hours, the PUMP token fell 15%.
On Tuesday the token was trading about 33% below its ICO price of $0.004.
