The Most Profitable App in the Crypto World Starts to Decline

From going head-to-head with bonk.fun, to conducting and completing one of the largest fundraising events in cryptocurrency history, this year's pump.fun, while not as spectacular in terms of making money as last year, is still enjoying some success. As of today, pump.fun has spent nearly 1 million SOL tokens (around 188 million USD) in fee income to buy back $PUMP, accounting for 12.227% of the total supply.

However, the continuous and substantial buyback has not boosted pump.fun's token price in any way, and it continues to decline. The actions of pump.fun and its co-founder Alon are increasingly unsettling the market. The day before yesterday, Mario Nawfal, a prominent figure with over 2.6 million followers, publicly criticized pump.fun on his alternate account:

"Even though pump.fun is a for-profit company, their actions are baffling. While Solana has been struggling, they sold billions worth of SOL. They completed the $PUMP event months ago with a promise of an airdrop, which has yet to materialize, and there has been no reinvestment in the entire ecosystem. Regardless of the ethical obligation for this company to do good, from a purely business perspective, how can their ecosystem thrive if they are so indifferent to it?"

This may be the largest KOL-led public criticism of pump.fun we have seen to date. Just hours after this tweet, pump.fun announced a $10,000 community grant to each of the 6 meme coins in its ecosystem, a move that only added fuel to the fire and was ruthlessly mocked as "trench warfare."

Underneath this tweet, many responses read:

"I see you, lol."

"This is seriously hilarious."

"You make so much money every day, and then only give these hard-working meme coins in your ecosystem $10,000? What can you do with $10,000?"

In August of this year, when pump.fun faced a fierce challenge from bonk.fun, they launched the Glass Full Foundation, spending around 1.7 million USD to acquire some well-performing meme coins within their ecosystem. However, since then, pump.fun has not supported any of the meme coins in its ecosystem with actual funding. About two weeks ago, the "last survivor" in the Glass Full Foundation, $neet, also dropped below the price at which pump.fun bought in. The foundation's holdings have all suffered losses, totaling approximately 1.37 million USD.

Players who firmly stood on the side of pump.fun during the battle against bonk.fun, as well as those players who hoped that pump.fun would be able to take on the responsibility of revitalizing the meme market, can be said to be as disappointed as they come. They hoped that pump.fun would properly support its own ecosystem, rather than suddenly rushing to do CCM (Celebrity Coin Masternode), then rushing to do ICM (Influencer Coin Masternode), ending up making a mess of everything.

A significant amount of buyback but a languishing $PUMP token price, amid this increasingly gloomy player sentiment and disappointment, has also gradually come under scrutiny.

"How do you explain $PUMP conducting a buyback of over 10% but still trading below its issuance price?"

And in this situation, the pump.fun official account, as well as the official account of pump.fun's co-founder Alon, inexplicably fell into a silence lasting about 10 days, without a single tweet. Even the previous important pump.fun update, "Mayhem Mode," was not even mentioned by the pump.fun official account.

By the way, "Mayhem Mode" was also an update that players heavily criticized. This was because in the slump of the Solana meme market, the lowering of the token graduation threshold in "Mayhem Mode" and the mechanism of random purchase of tokens by opening this mode through fees from the tokens were seen as pump.fun exploiting the situation.

The nonsensical silence prompted even the AI aixbt to come out and fire shots at pump.fun:

"pump.fun has collected $300M in fees but the token graduation rate is now only 0.7%. There are 12,610 launches per day, with only 98 successful launches. The platform profits from 99.3% of failed token launches. The team disappeared 13 days ago, which was the highest trading volume week in history. Supposedly, their buyback is just moving funds around, and the product itself is a value-extracting machine."

Later, a tweet from Lookonchain sparked rumors in the market that "pump.fun has exit scammed":

"It appears that pump.fun has cashed out at least $4.365 billion since October 15."

This tweet finally made pump.fun "rise from the dead." Pump.fun's co-founder Sapijiju tweeted claiming that Lookonchain's tweet was completely unfounded, stating that pump.fun had not cashed out any funds but simply transferred the funds raised in the fundraising event to different wallets for the company to use for investment and business development.

This explanation seemed feeble and unconvincing. The only disclosed acquisitions by pump.fun so far are Kolscan and Padre, the former being a tool to track Key Opinion Leader (KOL) transaction profits and losses, and the latter being a trading terminal. When the acquisition of Padre was announced, pump.fun also declared that the Padre token would no longer be used on the platform and that there were no further plans for its future.

Imagine a scenario in Web2 where a company is acquired, and just as the shareholders are joyful for not even 2 minutes, they are informed that all their shares are now worthless. That was the cruel and heartless tragedy that occurred that evening, where those who did not carefully read the entire tweet thread ended up being left hanging on a cliff, with the original $PADRE holders having nowhere to turn for help.

Holding a coin of a product -> Finally seeing it being acquired by a major industry player -> Instantly feeling joyful and excited -> Only to find out the acquiring party declared the token useless from now on with no future plans -> Brutally cut off at the knees

Ultimately, although the rumors of pump.fun's exit scam currently lack any foundation and pump.fun has responded, this incident is a concentrated manifestation of market dissatisfaction. If pump.fun was merely a cunning business, in their cunning, they completely disregarded human emotions, making them far from being called shrewd strategists.

Of course, it's also possible that they have made enough money and no longer care. After all, the airdrop went from a tweet on July 9 saying "coming soon" to today with no sign of anything soon in sight. Alon said the fourth quarter would be a brilliant one, but it turned out to be a complete dud. The lack of respect for the community through opaque communication and a community reward that feels like a joke has only served to further alienate players.

How does this make "trench" feel about saying "I love you," pump.fun?