It is no longer news that the industrys largest meme issuance platform, pump.fun, will publicly raise $1 billion at a valuation of $4 billion. As the meme coin craze recedes and the golden dogs no longer emerge in endlessly, both the Chinese and English circles generally have many voices worried that pump.funs coin issuance will drain a large amount of liquidity, and believe that this will temporarily put an end to the meme coin track.
As a phenomenal application layer leader in the cryptocurrency circle, pump.fun has been a money-printing machine in the industry for quite a long time. But with the retreat of liquidity and narrative, pump.fun itself is also trying to transform, such as learning from traditional Internet platforms and creating platform-native influencers to attract traffic. So is pump.fun still worth a valuation of $4 billion now?
Is it worth the $4 billion valuation?
pump.funs total historical revenue is currently about $758 million, making it one of the most profitable projects in the Web3 field. According to DefiLlama data, pump.funs revenue in the past 30 days is $41.61 million. The projects with higher revenue are either stablecoins and related ones (Tether, Circle, and Tron) or DEX (PancakeSwap, Hyperliquid), and there is no Solana ecosystem project that can rival it.
The annualized revenue is about $500 million, which corresponds to a valuation of $4 billion, and the price-to-sales ratio is 8 times. Of course, the markets doubts are more about the current pump.fun cant support this valuation, rather than the glorious pump.fun cant support this valuation.
The income of pump.fun fluctuates according to the overall popularity of meme coins. The high points of the graduation rate of newly issued tokens of pump.fun were in mid-to-late November last year and mid-to-late January this year, with the weekly graduation rate of newly issued tokens reaching 1.67% and 1.62% respectively, which is twice the current rate.
Correspondingly, the average daily revenue during these two periods was at least over 4 million US dollars, which is basically 3-4 times the current level, and there were even cases where the daily revenue exceeded 10 million US dollars. The number of newly issued tokens per day was at least over 50,000, which is twice the current level.
Whether pump.fun chooses to issue coins at the peak or now, they will definitely be criticized. If it is at the peak, it will not be the current valuation, and everyone will blame them for destroying the meme coin bull market. If it is now, everyone will blame them for adding fuel to the fire, extracting liquidity and making the already low ebb meme coin market even worse. But if you think about it from another angle, will meme coins still have the same hot market as before? Or will they be unable to recover like Inscription? In addition, there are ways to survive a bull market and a bear market. As the project party, pump.fun, what they have done in the current bad market environment can make us see that they have the hope of revitalizing the meme coin market, and still maintain their leading position with some kind of moat when the possible meme coin bull market comes again?
Differentiation between Chinese and English versions
In the Chinese community, aside from the current biggest topic of discussion around pump.fun, issuing coins, in general, people are either more concerned about the fact that pump.funs issuance of coins will drive the rise of some platform concept meme coins, such as $alon related to the founder @a 1 lon 9 or mascot $cupsey, etc. Or they are more concerned about new platforms such as letsbonk.fun.
There are two interesting opinions. The first one comes from KOL @thecryptoskanda , who believes that pump.funs mass media attribute is unique, and that pump.fun is the king in capturing the attention span of the younger generation of users.
Although @thecryptoskandas view is somewhat controversial, a very interesting phenomenon has indeed formed between the meme player group and traditional media. Players who speculate in meme coins have inadvertently become a group of highly efficient journalists in the world in pursuit of profits. Journalists from traditional media may not speculate in coins at all, but they always report on what happens in the coin circle in traditional media, and inadvertently become promotional ambassadors for meme coins.
The second is from @memekiller 365 ’s opinion on a “meme war map” recently released by @brainletcto . As $SPX has continued to rise from the bottom in the past month and recently hit a record high, the old meme coins and the new meme coins born from platforms such as pump.fun and letsbonk.fun have a PK trend, and the forces behind them are each doing their own thing.
What about the English community? In fact, there is no clear version of the English community. They still play and make noise, and the horses run and dance as usual. However, they pay more attention to the live broadcast of pump.fun, and some of the community coins of pump.fun also make people feel that in the current market environment, pump.fun has also slowed down.
From fast-paced casino to slow-paced media?
Gainzy, an Israeli, is currently the most popular anchor on pump.fun. Due to the war some time ago, he had to hide in air-raid shelters frequently.
In the past month, more and more Gainzy live streaming clips have become popular in the English circle. As the popularity rises, the price of Gainzys own live streaming tokens has also continued to rise.
In May, pump.fun founder Alon commented on Gainzy, He single-handedly revived Ethereum, pump.fun live streaming, and hair removal clinics, and called him the Ansem of the last bull market.
Then Ansem asked (jokingly), Do you know who Gainzy is? After more than 12,000 votes, 34.8% of voters still chose I dont know him. Even now, the Chinese community may still be more familiar with the pump.fun ecological star at the Ansem stage, and is indeed not familiar with Gainzy.
Who is Gainzy? According to @StarPlatinumSOL ’s tweets, Gainzy quit his job in 2017 and became a full-time cryptocurrency investor. He was first involved in controversy during the ICO bull market as a developer of a Rug project called Obsidian. After that, he created a trading robot and sold it in 2018.
Gainzy was also one of the earliest KOLs to promote FTX, with a monthly commission of up to 50,000 US dollars at its peak. Before pump.fun live broadcast, he was a broadcaster sponsored by Rollbit, and he caused controversy again because he promoted $RLB while secretly dumping the market.
ZachXBT also criticized Gainzy at the time, Why did you sell off the stock in less than a day after you tweeted that you bought $400,000 of $RLB?
Gainzy first became popular because he was so upset by ETH that he blasted Vitalik and the entire Ethereum Foundation on a live broadcast on May 8. Influenced by the live broadcast, ETH began to rise, and the English circle joked that Gainzy helped ETH build a solid bottom and saved Ethereum.
His live broadcasts do not involve chain scanning or dog hunting. Instead, he smokes one cigarette after another and shares his views on cryptocurrencies. In terms of his live broadcast style, he is very much like a CSGO anchor who has made money but still broadcasts like a grassroots. As his popularity grows, people such as Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz and Yuga Labs co-founder Garga.eth have all conducted live broadcasts with him.
The latest live stream star of pump.fun is @rasmr_eth . Like Gainzy, he is also a big KOL, with nearly 110,000 followers on Twitter and more than 10,000 followers on Twitch. He started out by making a big splash, holding a press conference like Steve Jobs, explaining in detail why he brought his talent to pump.fun.
After $rasmr was issued, its market value once exceeded 15 million US dollars, but now it has fallen below 6 million US dollars.
There are rumors that pump.fun paid Gainzy and rasmr to live stream on pump.fun. This rumor cannot be confirmed, but the importance of pump.fun to live streaming can also be seen from the $1 million anchor incentive that began at the end of May.
In addition to these live streaming stars, $HOUSE, which rose sharply in late April, also brought out new influencers such as @Fapita l3 , @bigtonebigtone and @Primed 25. In the above meme war map, $neet, a small coin with a current market value of less than 5 million US dollars, was included in it precisely because of the strong support of the above three people. The coin once rose to a market value of nearly 25 million US dollars.
TYBT, short for Thank you big tone, was one of the hottest memes on pump.fun last month. However, big tone has been on a break recently, and can only be seen in small groups and occasionally on Twitter Space.
Since the beginning of this year, many Web3 live broadcast platforms have emerged, but pump.fun is undoubtedly the most web-savvy one among all Web3 live broadcasts. Although everyones impression may still be more on the era of pump.fun live broadcasts, the current pump.fun seems to be trying to get out of the early wild growth of Kuaishou and is cultivating its own traffic matrix system in a targeted manner. Even now, pump.fun will make people feel a kind of PVE illusion. From big coins like $FARTCOIN with a market value of over $1 billion to small coins like $neet and $chillhouse with a market value of less than $10 million, there is no fighting between the communities, and the interactions are frequent and the unity is quite close.
(As of the time of this article, $chillhouse’s market value has exceeded $10 million, with a peak close to $18 million)
Alon, the founder of pump.fun, also seems to have paid considerable attention to these small coins that have shown different faces. In an interview with Decrypt, he specifically mentioned $neet because the coin used the creator incentives given by the platform to hold an offline no work protest on Wall Street. After the official Twitter account of the coin tweeted to express gratitude, Alon retweeted it.
$chillhouse has swept through major pump.fun live broadcast rooms and KOL Twitter messages with the viral slogan Thoughts on chillhouse? This has become one of the hottest memes in the pump.fun ecosystem recently. There is nothing else to it, just nonsense, like a bunch of drunk people scribbling on the street. Alon also retweeted $chillhouses related tweets.
$neet, who “refuses to work”, and $chillhouse, which is a viral and nonsensical product, are both very appealing to young people. Pump.fun still has the best sense of the subculture of Generation Z in the crypto circle, which is their “soft moat”.
Of course, from creator incentives to anchor incentives, the criticism of pump.fun in the market has never stopped. Many players believe that pump.fun is in a bad business, and finally the stingy people have to take out some money to subsidize it. But from the perspective of the project side of the business, a hot market with golden dogs every day is of course the best, but you must also think of tricks on ordinary days. Recruiting influencers, taking advantage of the situation to promote newcomers, and building your own traffic matrix will be the primer to start the next wave of market frenzy. After all, a market full of golden dogs always starts with one or two golden dogs. Since the development of meme coins, a brainwashing emoticon package or directly moving memes from Web2 has limited stimulation to players desire to consume, and it is difficult for players to imagine how big the space is (it cant be drilled).
What to do? The answer given by pump.fun is to capture the identity of young people ($house, $neet), not to rely solely on the output of hot or flashy meme coins, but to try to support some memes that follow the rhythm of young peoples memes ($chillhouse) and live streaming that can degen the taste of the cryptocurrency circle.
Conclusion
I don’t think that the issuance of pump.fun will be the end of meme coins. It may be a phased end, but it will never be the end of meme coins. We have always seemed to like to attribute the failure of a track to a certain project, such as Blur ruining NFT. But if a track can be destroyed by a project, it means that the track has actually died a long time ago.
There are countless young people in the world who want to change their destiny, and cryptocurrency is the most enduring and relatively attractive place for young people. The stock market is not short of narratives, and people will always naturally believe in the stories written by the elites. Meme coins will not die, because grassroots people also need to have their own stories that can change their destiny.
After the tide receded, I hope that pump.fun media can go further. When coin stocks absorbed the attention of the coin circle and became the playground of the elites, the wild but young crypto flavor of pump.fun became much more friendly.
