Real-life "Black Mirror" - Pumpfun Go: Lick a Toilet for $40, Get a Logo Tattooed on Your Forehead for $14,000

Original by Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author: Golem (@web3_golem)

If someone offered you $550, would you be willing to lick a toilet floor?

At first glance, most people would feel offended, as if their dignity were being trampled. But upon calming down, many might waver internally—"Just this once, trading a bit of dignity seems worth it."

This is not a plot from a human nature experiment film nor a fictional moral dilemma. It's a real bounty posted on the task platform Pumpfun Go. And if you were genuinely weighing the offer of $410, I'm here to tell you that someone else was quicker to get down on their knees, and the actual reward wasn't $550, but roughly $5.63 (around 40 RMB).

A submission video shows a man licking a gas station toilet floor

Licking a toilet is just an ordinary bounty on Pumpfun Go. More extreme tasks include: eating live insects, quitting your job in front of your boss, forehead tattoos, and the ultimate task: suicide (for 1000 SOL, worth approximately $700,000).

(Bounty for suicide)

Here, the wealthy use money to purchase novelty and humiliation, the poor trade their bodies and dignity for survival, and onlookers consume it all with relish from behind their screens. When "we need money" becomes the ultimate pass, how much further can the bottom line of human morality fall?

Pumpfun Go: Pay Anyone to Do Anything

Pumpfun Go is a new product launched by the overseas Meme coin launchpad Pump.fun in early June. Its slogan is simple and brutal: Pay anyone to do anything.

On Pumpfun Go, anyone can create bounties anonymously, complete tasks anonymously, and submit evidence (usually videos) to compete for the reward, which is paid in cryptocurrency. To prevent creators from reneging, the platform requires the full reward amount to be escrowed with a third party at the time of task creation. The official team then reviews all submitted evidence based on the creator's pre-stated criteria and decides who gets the bounty.

According to official data, within less than a month of launch, a total of 238 bounties were posted on Pumpfun Go. Completed tasks have paid out $605,000 to winners, with pending tasks holding $225,000 in rewards, averaging $3,487 per task.

The highest-paying task currently available (approximately $56,000) was posted by an online gambling platform, challenging a participant to climb to the summit of Mount Everest and place a bet on their platform. The second highest (around $28,000) was posted by a Meme project, requiring the challenger to run a full marathon dressed as the "memecoin" mascot and break the world record for a mascot running a marathon (3 minutes 14.46 seconds). The third highest (around $26,000) required a challenger to personally visit the match venues of every team participating in the World Cup, film a video, and shout "$WORLDCUP2026 COIN TO THE MOON."

The highest bounty tasks on Pumpfun Go

In reality, most bounties posted on Pumpfun Go are related to promoting Meme coins. Pump.fun's original purpose in launching this product was to incentivize players to build Meme coin communities and unlock more gameplay possibilities.

For example, the NEET community, themed around "decadent culture," offered a $14,000 bounty for organizing a NEET parade in New York and a $3,000 bounty for quitting a job in front of a boss. The FITNESS community posted a $150 bounty for doing 100 push-ups in 60 seconds. The CHANCE community offered a $1,500 bounty for organizing a trash cleanup activity.

Five challengers split the $1,500 bounty from the CHANCE community

These examples might represent the last vestiges of "warmth" on Pumpfun Go. The remaining tasks are mostly filled with humiliation, bad taste, and harm.

Consequently, as soon as Pumpfun Go launched, many saw it as a real-life version of the first episode of Black Mirror's seventh season, "Common People." However, another film released ten years earlier, Nerve, had already predicted the inevitable pitfalls of traffic chasing, cyberbullying, and collective frenzy of anonymous groups that would accompany Pumpfun Go's rise.

In the movie, the protagonist Vee is a shy high school student. She accidentally downloads the wildly popular live-streaming game Nerve, where viewers can pay to set challenges for players. Initially, the challenges are harmless, like kissing a stranger or going out in a bizarre costume. But as viewership skyrockets and rewards increase, the tasks become more dangerous and grotesque, such as stripping naked or riding a motorcycle blindfolded at high speed.

In the film, the protagonists are asked to strip in an elevator

The core of Meme coin hype is capturing attention. From a human nature perspective, sensational, humiliating, exaggerated, and shocking content always attracts more eyeballs than warm, positive content. To generate buzz for their Meme coins, players are inevitably drawn to posting controversial bounties, leading Pumpfun Go down a path of absurdity and chaos.

Towards Absurdity and Chaos: Earning $14,000 for a Forehead Tattoo

Pumpfun Go's platform rules explicitly prohibit bounties involving violence, defamation, threats, discrimination, and pornography. Content causing substantial harm is easily identifiable, but tasks with a sensational or humiliating nature cannot be banned. There is no universal baseline for human tolerance of morality and dignity. The relationship between task creators and challengers here is simply "one party is willing to pay, the other is willing to play," because the price is just too high to refuse.

Currently, the highest earner on Pumpfun Go is a user named "riri_z1," who completed a single task for a bounty of approximately $14,000 (around ¥95,000 RMB). The task? Tattooing "bounty.fun" on their forehead.

The task creator required "bounty.fun" to be tattooed on the forehead because they had launched a Meme coin with the same name, expecting a massive surge in attention. The task was completed by an elderly Filipino man, who simply said in his submission, "we need money."

But how did a man in his sixties come across this obscure bounty platform? The more likely truth is that another challenger saw the task, wanted the money but didn't want the tattoo on their own forehead, so they found a local elderly man to do it. As for how much of the bounty the old man actually received, no one cares.

"riri_z1" wasn't the first to complete a forehead tattoo task on Pumpfun Go. That title belongs to challenger "arivu," whose story is even more dramatic. On June 6th, he tattooed the Meme coin "$boutywork" on his forehead for a bounty of around $3,000. However, the task creator, ayushquant, had misspelled the name in the bounty post, writing "$boutywork" instead of "$bountywork" (missing an 'n'). Consequently, ayushquant reposted a corrected forehead tattoo task and did not recognize arivu's initial submission.

Arivu's completed tattoo: "$boutywork"

Six days later, "arivu" completed the new task. This time, he got the letter 'n' tattooed just above the space between 'u' and 't'. Seemingly moved by arivu's dedication, the official team ultimately awarded him the bounties for both forehead tattoo tasks, totaling approximately $6,000 (around ¥40,000 RMB).

In his submission, arivu showed no resentment towards the task creator ayushquant for the typo. Instead, his message was filled with gratitude: "Thank you @ayushquant for the opportunity again and thanks to pump.fun for creating opportunities that truly change lives."

The high-paying completed bounties on Pumpfun Go are mostly similar in nature to the forehead tattoos, filled with novelty, absurdity, and pranks. ayushquant is the task creator who has paid out the most in bounties, totaling around $10,000. His posted tasks include drinking a bottle of hot sauce, eating three live worms on camera, and doing a backflip off a roof into a pool. ayushquant had previously posted bounties for helping the homeless, but those received far less attention than his "hardcore" challenges.

A man eats three live worms on camera for a bounty of $174 (about ¥1,200 RMB)

What Exactly Are We Sighing About?

Although all challenges are voluntarily completed by participants, who even express gratitude to the creators after receiving payment, society at large continues to criticize Pumpfun Go. Critics argue it essentially induces vulnerable people to perform humiliating and degrading acts in public, amplifying the darker side of human nature.

Under a discussion thread on X about arivu's forehead tattoo, an X product manager commented, saying: "Sad that when all the rich people left crypto, now the whole industry is just American teenagers forcing poor people to do embarrassing things."

New York State Governor Kathy Hochul directly quoted Pump.fun's announcement post about Pumpfun Go, stating: "The first thing to do is to put a bounty on legislation aimed at banning this dystopian nightmare." (Odaily Note: Baton Corporation, Pump.fun's parent company, is based in New York.)

New York State Governor criticizes Pumpfun Go

However, Kathy Hochul's remarks were quickly met with backlash from Pump.fun supporters. The Meme coin account Chill House responded sarcastically: "Dear Governor, this new product (Pumpfun Go) is as serious as the growing homelessness problem in New York since the pandemic. How will you solve the issue of insufficient housing construction so people don't have to live on the streets?"

From the supporters' perspective, Pumpfun Go does not widen the wealth gap or inequality; rather, it offers those struggling financially a chance to improve their lives, even creating a new form of "wealth redistribution." A challenger named xavz, who earned a $3,000 bounty by completing the "quit your job in front of a mirror" task, provided firsthand testimony.

In his submission, challenger xavz wrote: "I'm doing this because the opportunity from neetcoin (the task creator) is way better than my company. I earned $3,000 in one day from this task, whereas my company pays me only $200 a month. Plus, I can work from home and spend time with my family."

Xavz resigned to earn the $3,000 bounty

Pump.fun itself has not responded to the overwhelming criticism on social media. Its only action was announcing on June 25th that it was hiring a Chief Legal Officer (CLO) with an annual salary between $1 million and $5 million.

This debate over the bottom line of morality and dignity probably has no conclusion. Within the entire mechanism of Pumpfun Go, the wealthy gain amusement, and the poor gain money. It seems like a mutually beneficial, perfectly fair "win-win." But why, when we witness it all, do we still feel an uncontrollable, profound sense of sadness and dismay?

Pumpfun Go reflects the power structure of our society. The greatest asset the rich possess isn't money; it's the poor. When a person is desperate enough for cash, dignity, body, and reputation all become commodities with a price tag. The question "we need money" reveals just how much people are willing to give up. Exploiting economic inequality to drive desperate individuals to perform permanent or high-risk acts for money is a sin that Pump.fun can never wash away.

Our sigh is not for the impoverished individuals themselves, because we know that in their shoes, we might not choose differently. What truly saddens us is that in an era boasting technological leaps and civilizational progress, society still operates this way—turning the pain, desperation, and loss of dignity of the weak into content for spectators to casually consume and applaud.

If we gaze into the abyss of history, we see that this phenomenon may not have fundamentally changed for millennia. From the blood of slaves entertaining nobles in Roman arenas in the 3rd century BC, to freak shows in circuses, to bizarre short videos and live streaming battles today—the medium changes, but the morbid fascination with watching others' danger, pain, and humiliation never disappears.

After this endless melancholy, perhaps we can only place a glimmer of hope in the future.

AI is increasing the productivity of the entire society at an unprecedented pace. If AI truly takes over humanity's burdensome survival tasks, and if the wealth created by technology one day becomes enough to cover the basic needs of every ordinary person, so that no one needs to lick a toilet floor for a few dollars, tattoo letters on their forehead for a few thousand, or accept any humiliating challenge just to survive—only then, when everyone can live with dignity, might humanity truly step out of this millennia-long wilderness.