Pump.fun (PUMP): how the Solana memecoin launchpad makes money, and what could go wrong

Pump.fun is a website and app where anyone can create a memecoin on the Solana blockchain in a few clicks and trade it from the first second. It went live in January 2024. DefiLlama, whose data on the platform starts in March 2024, counts $2.33 billion of trading fees paid by users since then, of which $1.37 billion was kept as revenue by the company. Its token, PUMP, was sold to the public on 12 July 2025, and half of the platform’s net revenue now goes to buying it back and burning it.

The business is large, but it is not the one of early 2025. Pump.fun kept $67.8 million in the 30 days to 18 October 2026, less than half the $149.8 million it kept in January 2025, its best month on DefiLlama’s count. Fewer than one coin in a hundred launched there reaches the next stage. On 31 August 2026 a federal judge in New York let racketeering claims against the operator and its three founders go forward, and the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority has had the firm on its warning list since December 2024. Figures were read on 19 October 2026 unless a date says otherwise.

What is Pump.fun? A memecoin launchpad on Solana

A launchpad, in crypto, is a service that helps new tokens get created and find their first buyers. Most launchpads screen projects and run scheduled sales. Pump.fun does neither. Anyone with a Solana wallet can open a coin with a name, a ticker and a picture, and trading starts at once. The platform’s documentation says it lets anyone create coins with equal access to buy and sell from the start. It also tells users that prices can move quickly.

Memecoins are tokens with no product behind them: their value rests on a joke, a picture, an online community or a moment of attention. Pump.fun turned the creation of such coins into a cheap, standard procedure that takes a minute, then built a business on the trading that follows.

Users keep their coins in their own wallets, such as Phantom. What Pump.fun runs is the interface, the on-chain programs that set prices, and a growing set of trading products around them. The company publishes developer guides, program interfaces and two software kits in a public GitHub repository.

How Pump.fun works: bonding curve, graduation and PumpSwap

Every new coin starts on a bonding curve. There is no order book and no seller on the other side. The program itself sells tokens to buyers and buys them back from sellers, at a price set by a formula: each purchase moves the price up the curve, each sale moves it down. Early buyers pay less than later ones. Late buyers are the ones left holding the coin when early buyers sell.

When enough has been bought to fill the curve, the coin graduates. Its liquidity, the pool of tokens and money that lets people trade, leaves the curve and moves to a regular exchange pool. Until March 2025 that pool sat on Raydium, another Solana exchange: according to The Block, a coin had to reach a market value of $69,000 and paid a 6 SOL migration fee.

On 20 March 2025 Pump.fun launched its own exchange, PumpSwap, and sent graduating coins there instead, without the 6 SOL charge. At launch a PumpSwap trade cost 0.25%, with 0.20% going to liquidity providers and 0.05% to the protocol, The Block reported; co-founder Alon Cohen called the exchange a step that would help grow the ecosystem. Today a graduation costs 0.015 SOL per coin, according to the platform’s fee page.

Graduation is rare. Decrypt, citing the Dune analyst Adam Tehc, reported in July 2025 that the share of new coins that graduated fell from 1.67% in November 2024 to 0.58% in May 2025. The rest stay on the curve, where most of them are soon forgotten.

Launch counts can mislead, too. Conor Grogan, head of product at Coinbase, wrote in January 2025 that a single person was responsible for about 18,000 tokens created on Pump.fun, Cointelegraph reported.

The menu has grown since 2024. Coins can now be paired with USDC as well as SOL, or with other assets as “custom pairs”. A creator can choose at launch to send the creator fee to the coin’s holders instead of keeping it, an option the platform calls Holder Rewards. DefiLlama also counts revenue from Mayhem mode, a time-limited mode in which an automated agent trades. We could not confirm when those last two features launched.

Pump.fun fees: what traders and creators pay

Creating a coin carries no platform fee. The creator pays the Solana network fee and a small SOL deposit for the token’s on-chain accounts. Trading is where the money is made. The figures below come from Pump.fun’s fee page, last updated on 17 October 2026.

On PumpSwap the fee falls as a coin’s market value rises, in steps measured in SOL: 1.25% below 420 SOL, 0.30% from 98,240 SOL. The Platform Fee comes on top of all the other fees, but only for trades placed in Pump.fun’s own web and mobile apps. The page also warns that fees can change whenever it is updated, and that the amounts the app displays may not exactly match what the smart contract charges.

The creator fee is the reason many people launch coins at all. On the bonding curve, 0.30% of every trade goes to whoever created the coin, whether or not the creator still holds any of it.

How Pump.fun makes money: $1.37 billion of revenue since 2024

DefiLlama tracks Pump.fun as a group with four parts: the pump.fun launchpad, PumpSwap, Terminal and the mobile app. It separates fees, everything users pay, from revenue, the part Pump.fun keeps: by DefiLlama’s definition, its slice of the bonding-curve fee, graduation fees and Mayhem-mode fees. Creator and liquidity-provider shares are not revenue.

Source: DefiLlama, Pump fees and revenue, read at 05:54 UTC on 19 October 2026. On 18 October alone, revenue came to about $1.87 million. Between 12 and 17 October it ranged from $1.70 million to $2.29 million a day.

The gap between the two columns has widened. In January 2025 users paid $149.8 million in fees and Pump.fun kept all of it, by DefiLlama’s count. In September 2026 users paid $165.4 million, the highest monthly total in the series, but Pump.fun kept $53.1 million. The difference now goes mostly to coin creators and liquidity providers. Trading is as busy as at the peak; the company’s cut is smaller.

Revenue also swings with the memecoin mood. Monthly revenue fell to $20.1 million in July 2025, the lowest since September 2024, then climbed back to $58.1 million in August 2026, according to DefiLlama.

Part of that July 2025 dip came from a rival. On 6 July 2025 The Block reported that LetsBonk, a Solana launchpad tied to the BONK memecoin, had overtaken Pump.fun on daily launches, with about 15,600 against 11,500, and on 24-hour volume. A month later The Block’s own data put Pump.fun back at about 75% of graduated tokens on Solana launchpads. Raydium opened its own launchpad, LaunchLab, in April 2025. We found no reliable 2026 market-share figure.

Other dashboards give other totals for the same revenue, so every figure on this page carries its source and date.

From launchpad to trading company: PumpSwap, Padre, Vyper and perps

Pump.fun’s answer to depending on one kind of product has been to own more of the trade. PumpSwap, in March 2025, kept graduated coins and their fees in-house. On 24 October 2025 the company announced it had bought Padre, a trading terminal used mainly for memecoins on Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain and Base, for an undisclosed sum. Pump.fun said terminals were important for driving trading volume, according to Cointelegraph.

On 5 February 2026 it bought Vyper, a trading execution terminal, again without disclosed terms. Vyper’s team and technology moved into Terminal, Pump.fun’s multichain trading platform, and the Vyper product was to be shut down. Cohen said the team would help build “super rapid and efficient cross-chain trading infrastructure”, The Block reported.

This week the push went one step further. On 17 October 2026 Pump.fun updated its terms and fee page for perpetual futures, leveraged contracts whose orders it routes to Hyperliquid, the derivatives exchange, and added the Platform Fee on web and app trades. The perps are closed to anyone in the United States or the Canadian province of Ontario, the terms say. Our news piece on the Pump.fun perps launch covers the details.

Who is behind Pump.fun: three founders and two companies

Pump.fun was built by Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler and Noah Tweedale, who are also named as defendants in the US case described below. Reports give them different titles, so we list all three as co-founders. Cohen usually speaks for the company in public. Decrypt reported in July 2025 that the founders started out working remotely, moved into a London WeWork within months and had more than 70 employees by then. Cohen told the outlet that “the overwhelming majority of funds are reinvested directly into product development.”

The legal set-up is spelled out in Pump.fun’s terms of use. Bracket Company, Ltd., registered in the British Virgin Islands, owns the platform and its intellectual property and receives the fees. Baton Corporation, Ltd., a company of England and Wales, develops and operates the platform on Bracket’s behalf. The terms are governed by BVI law, and disputes go to arbitration in Tortola.

A pseudonymous co-founder known as Sapijiju also speaks for the company. In November 2025 the on-chain analytics account Lookonchain said 436.5 million USDC had moved from Pump.fun wallets to the Kraken exchange since 15 October. Sapijiju called the claim “complete misinformation” and said the transfers were treasury management of the token-sale proceeds, Cointelegraph reported. Neither side’s account has been independently verified.

The PUMP token: sale, allocation and unlocks

PUMP is a Solana token with a maximum supply of one trillion. It was sold on 12 July 2025. Cointelegraph reported that the public sale sold out in about 12 minutes and raised $500 million. DefiLlama now lists $600 million from the public sale and $400 million from a private sale on the same day, at a $4 billion valuation, which works out at $0.004 per token for the full trillion. Other trackers give higher totals, and we found no final figure published by Pump.fun.

We found no official tokenomics page either. The allocation below comes from Tokenomist. Cointelegraph reported the sale, community and investor shares at the time of the sale; the other lines rest on Tokenomist alone. Our tokenomics glossary entry explains how to read such a table.

The team and existing investors hold a third of the supply between them. Tokenomist says most allocations are released through cliffs and that the schedule runs into 2029. The first insider cliff fell in July 2026, a year after the sale, but trackers disagree on how many tokens it freed, so we give no figure.

On 19 October 2026 about 462 billion PUMP were in circulation, some 46% of the maximum, according to both Tokenomist and CoinGecko. CoinGecko’s total supply figure of 827.2 billion implies that about 17% of the original trillion has been burned, by our arithmetic.

What does holding PUMP give? Less than many buyers assume. The documents we could read do not promise holders a vote, a share of fees or any claim on the company. The token’s link to the business is a company policy: buying PUMP back with revenue and destroying it.

PUMP buyback and burn: half of net revenue until April 2027

From mid-July 2025, Pump.fun spent its revenue on buying PUMP on the open market. On 28 April 2026 it changed the rules, as The Block reported. All the tokens bought back until then, worth about $370 million and equal to 36% of the circulating supply at the time, were burned. From that day, 50% of net revenue from the bonding curve, PumpSwap and Terminal buys PUMP on the open market and burns it, through what the company called an irreversible locked smart contract, for one year. The other half pays for hiring, bigger bets and marketing, so that the business relies less on its existing treasury.

Cohen defended the split in one line: “Every dollar not burned is a dollar being put to work toward the same outcome.”

The commitment is for one year, to about April 2027, and nothing obliges the company to renew it. The April rule names the bonding curve, PumpSwap and Terminal, but not the Platform Fee or the perps builder fee added in October 2026, and we found no statement on whether they count toward the buyback.

Buyback trackers, like revenue trackers, do not agree with each other. Anyone who wants the exact amounts bought and burned should check them on-chain rather than trust a single dashboard.

The Pump.fun lawsuit: what survived the August 2026 ruling

The main case is Aguilar v. Baton Corporation Ltd. d/b/a Pump.Fun (1:25-cv-00880), filed on 30 January 2025 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York as a proposed class action. The first complaint accused Pump.fun of selling unregistered securities, enabling pump-and-dump schemes and running weak identity checks, and named Baton Corporation and the three founders as defendants, The Block reported.

An amended complaint in July 2025 widened the case to racketeering (RICO), fraud and conspiracy, and added Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation, Jito Labs and the Jito Foundation as defendants. It called Pump.fun a “front-facing slot machine cabinet”, according to Cointelegraph. That is the plaintiffs’ allegation, not a finding. The plaintiffs later dropped Jito Labs.

On 31 August 2026 Judge Colleen McMahon ruled on the motions to dismiss. Wolf Popper, one of the plaintiffs’ law firms, said the order lets the RICO claims against Baton Corporation and its founders move forward, finding that the complaint plausibly describes an enterprise made up of Baton, the founders and 25 unidentified memecoin promoters.

Crypto Times and Protos, which reported the ruling on 1 September, add the rest. The securities claims over the FRED and GRIFFAIN tokens were dismissed because the judge found no “common enterprise” under the Howey test. Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation and their executives were dropped. Diego Aguilar’s own racketeering claims fell, while those of two other plaintiffs, Kendall Carnahan and Michael Okafor, survived against Baton, Cohen, Kerler and Tweedale. Crypto Times reports that a claim of unlicensed money transmission also survived. The judge gave the plaintiffs’ lawyers until 10 September to explain why the 25 promoters had not been identified and served.

The plaintiffs put retail losses across the platform at $4 billion to $5.5 billion. Nothing has been proven: these are allegations at the pleading stage. No trial date had been reported by 19 October 2026, and we found no detailed public response from Pump.fun. We could not read the opinion itself, as the court docket was not accessible to us, so the detail above rests on those reports.

Pump.fun in the UK: an FCA warning and a self-imposed ban

On 3 December 2024 the Financial Conduct Authority added Pump.fun to its warning list: “This firm may be providing or promoting financial services or products without our permission.” The notice lists the firm’s accounts on X, Telegram, Instagram and TikTok, and warns that its customers would have no access to the Financial Ombudsman Service and no protection from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

Three days later Pump.fun blocked UK users. Cohen told Decrypt the decision was the company’s own, not forced on it, and added: “This is permanent.” The current terms list the United Kingdom among prohibited jurisdictions, alongside sanctioned countries such as Iran, North Korea and Russia, and set a minimum age of 18. We have not checked whether Pump.fun holds any authorisation under the EU’s MiCA rules.

Security record: a 2024 exploit and no published audit

On 16 May 2024 about 12,300 SOL, then worth about $1.9 million, was taken from Pump.fun’s bonding-curve contracts, which held about $45 million in all. The company blamed a former employee who used a privileged position to gain withdrawal rights, and who borrowed SOL through flash loans to carry out the attack. Pump.fun paused trading, upgraded its contracts, promised to restore liquidity for the coins affected and cut trading fees to zero for seven days, The Block reported. We know of no loss of user funds from the platform’s programs since then.

As of 19 October 2026 we found no published security audit of the bonding-curve program or of PumpSwap by a recognised firm. DefiLlama lists none, the company’s documentation mentions none, and its GitHub organisation holds documentation and program interfaces, not audit reports. Automated token scans are not code audits.

Content moderation has been a problem too. On 25 November 2024 Pump.fun paused livestreaming after streams that ranged from animal cruelty to threats of self-harm, Decrypt reported; the company said it was pausing the feature “to ensure the absolute safety of our users”. The token allocation still reserves 3% for livestreaming.

The everyday risk is simpler. Most coins on the platform lose almost all their value, and anyone can copy a popular name. Our guide to avoiding crypto scams covers the warning signs, from fake tickers to coins whose creators sell everything minutes after launch.

Coindaro risk rating for Pump.fun: 4 out of 5

We rate Pump.fun 4 on a scale of 1 to 5. The business depends almost entirely on speculative memecoin trading, and its monthly revenue is well below the January 2025 peak. US racketeering claims against the operator and its founders are still alive. The UK regulator has warned against the firm. We found no published audit, and insider releases run into 2029. On the other side, the platform kept $486 million of revenue in the last 12 months, its buyback runs through a locked on-chain contract with a stated term, and we know of no theft from its programs since May 2024. This is a description of risk, not investment advice.

The next dates to watch are the end of the one-year buyback contract, around 28 April 2027, and the next steps in the New York case. Pump.fun publishes no forward-looking product roadmap that we could find.