Pump.fun, the token vending machine that drove Solana’s chaotic memecoin spring, is taking a page out of its own playbook: go viral and then monetise.
On Wednesday, the controversial memecoin generator, which has earned more than $780 million in fees, announced its initial coin offering, or ICO, after weeks of speculation about a possible token generation that could happen either via an airdrop or a public sale.
“Our plan is to Kill Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch. On Solana,” Pump.fun said on X.
The ICO announcement highlights how token sales are poised to make a return in 2025 after slowly fading after their 2017 and 2018 heydays when some 2,000 projects raked in over $13 billion through ICOs.
They fell out of fashion as about a tenth of the money raised was lost to scams, according to Statis Group. Dozens of enforcement actions followed.
Pump.fun’s ICO
Pump.fun’s token sale will happen on July 12, with 330 billion tokens out of the 1 trillion total supply available to investors. Each token will be sold at $0.004, putting the targeted raise over $1 billion.
Institutional purchasers will be allocated 180 billion tokens, while the remaining 150 million will go to public sale purchasers.
Investors from the UK and the US are not allowed to participate in the ICO, according to the announcement.
“We’re building Pump.fun to replace existing social platforms with one that gives instead of takes,” the memecoin generator said on X.
Many aren’t buying the narrative.
Some detractors reacted to the announcement by saying that Pump.fun extracts far more than it gives, and turns low-effort joke coins into fee machines while investors are left in the lurch holding worthless tokens that crater in short order.
“Remember the word after Pump is Dump,” Adam Cochran, a crypto influencer, chimed in on X.
Pump.fun’s ICO comes at a time when the once raucous gold rush for memecoins is at a low ebb. Since peaking at $127 billion in December, the market segment has since slumped to $56 billion.
The decline has happened amid mounting controversy over failed memecoins and platforms like Pump.fun that allow them to be created en masse.
But dwindling fervour for memecoins isn’t Pump.fun’s only headache.
The platform has lost its shine in recent weeks to a new rival.
LetsBonk, another memecoin generator, has become the new power player in the sector. LetsBonk now hosts twice as many token launches each day compared to Pump.fun, according to data from this Dune dashboard by the crypto analyst who goes by Adam_Tehc.
