$20,000 signing fee plus $30,000 monthly salary—the story behind Pump.fun poaching FOMO's talent

Original by Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author: Golem (@web3_golem)

The Meme market today is deeply fragmented. Whether in terms of chain ecosystems or trading tools, overseas and Chinese-speaking users have almost no overlap. This divide not only disperses global Meme capital across various ecosystems, but also makes even the "gossip" hard to follow.

On August 8, a rumor that "Pump.fun is spending big to poach competitors' users" went viral across overseas Meme communities.

Initially leaked by overseas user CLR, the claim states that Pump.fun is using incentive programs to attract users to migrate from the FOMO platform to Pump.fun. According to the disclosed agreement, Pump.fun offers eligible users a one-time signing bonus of $20,000, plus a fixed monthly payment of $30,000. The agreement requires signing users to: migrate funds and trading positions from FOMO to Pump.fun; use a new wallet not previously used on other platforms as their designated wallet; link their X account to their Pump.fun wallet; publicly declare on their X profile that this wallet is their only public wallet; and permanently delete and close their FOMO platform account.

Additionally, users must meet genuine trading requirements, including completing at least $25,000 in monthly trading volume on Pump.fun (or 25% of their previous average monthly volume on FOMO). Clearly, Pump.fun is going all-in to poach FOMO's users.

Chinese translation of the full agreement (Source: 0xAA)

From a business perspective, this is a normal competitive move with no legal issues. In entertainment platforms or user-centric business models, companies frequently pay KOLs or highly influential users to leave competitor platforms and maintain exclusive representation. This competitive pattern is also common in China—for example, early short-video and livestreaming platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and Huya signed top streamers to lucrative exclusive contracts.

But the first question that left onlookers puzzled is: who is FOMO?

Pump.fun is the largest token launchpad overseas, consistently ranking in the top five among on-chain protocols by fee revenue. Why would it need to fight for FOMO's users? And what makes FOMO such a formidable competitor that Pump.fun feels threatened? Odaily will use this "gossip" to analyze the undercurrents and major shifts in the overseas Meme market.

FOMO Has Become Users' Primary Meme Trading Platform

FOMO is a multi-chain Meme trading platform offering services similar to GMGN. Launched in May 2025, it has been operational for just over a year. According to RootData, FOMO has completed three funding rounds, raising a total of $94 million, with a valuation exceeding $550 million.

FOMO primarily serves overseas Meme communities and focuses on mobile trading. Most Chinese-speaking users may never have even heard of FOMO. What's more striking is that this platform you may never have heard of or used has generated more revenue over the past 30 days than Uniswap and Phantom, and its Trading Bot market share has surpassed GMGN to become the market leader.

According to DeFiLama data, FOMO's revenue over the past 30 days reached $8.17 million. While still trailing GMGN and Axiom, it has already surpassed major launchpads on Phantom, Uniswap, and Robinhood (Flap and Pons).

Meanwhile, according to Dune data, as of press time, FOMO's total fees have reached $30.39 million. As shown below, daily fees began surging in July, averaging over $200,000 per day, up from a previous average of just $10. As of press time, FOMO hit a new daily fee record of $556,000 on August 6.

Entering August, FOMO has sustained its high growth. As of August 8, FOMO's market share in Trading Bots has risen to 43%, surpassing GMGN to become the market leader—GMGN had previously held the top spot consistently.

How influential is FOMO right now? A recent example should make it clear. On August 4, Solana Meme coin CATE flash-crashed 65% within one minute, with its market cap dropping from over $80 million to around $20 million. The community attributed this to two factors: first, CATE's X account was suspended; second, FOMO experienced an outage, preventing users from trading during the downtime. There is still much debate around this incident, and interested readers can explore further. (Related reading: $CATE flash-crashes 65% in one minute, FOMO platform's "coincidental" outage fuels harvest suspicions)

Regardless of the truth, this incident demonstrates FOMO's current influence in the Meme ecosystem. So, from a product perspective, what made FOMO stand out from its competitors?

The answer lies in FOMO's product design. FOMO's core services are similar to most Meme trading platforms, but its slogan is "the only social-first trading application." This is reflected in its leaderboard feature and a news feed that provides real-time alerts on top traders' activities.

LEADERBOARD and FEED on the FOMO platform

The Meme market inherently worships the "money talks"强者 culture—anyone who earns enough is dubbed "smart money" and attracts a legion of followers and copy-traders. FOMO leverages this group dynamic, deliberately "creating gods" by using leaderboards and similar features to push highly profitable users into the spotlight and help them gain influence. FOMO team member @villagebythexyz posted on X on August 9, stating that compared to previous cycles, anyone with any influence in crypto must now be a skilled trader, emphasizing that "trading builds your following, not the other way around."

This model has proven highly successful. For instance, Solana Meme coin CATE didn't surge because of an attractive narrative, but rather through the explicit backing and traffic from "Little Ansem," Poorgoat. Poorgoat is a member of FOMO's Hall of Fame (a list of traders who achieved significant profits on FOMO and were officially recognized). Thanks to his fanbase, CATE created a "myth" despite having no compelling narrative.

Pump.fun has also recognized the immense growth potential of this model. On August 7, the Pump.fun app announced a social feature upgrade, essentially replicating FOMO's social functionality. Now, entering Pump.fun's homepage, users no longer see a flood of new Meme coin listings, but rather a feed of Meme traders'/KOLs' updates and trade monitoring alerts.

Pump.fun homepage

Pump.fun founder alon has also been actively posting to welcome multiple overseas Meme traders/KOLs to the Pump.fun app. To attract more prominent overseas Meme traders, Pump.fun has even resorted to poaching from FOMO, requiring traders to sign "exclusivity agreements."

This competitive behavior by Pump.fun essentially reflects that the overseas Meme market has entered an "influencer-driven" mode—whoever signs the most influential KOLs with strong copy-trading appeal wins the market.

The Overseas Meme Market Has Entered an Influencer-Driven Model

From FOMO's rise to Pump.fun's poaching, a significant shift is underway in the overseas Meme market: the core of competition is no longer about launch tools, trading speed, or on-chain liquidity, but rather a battle for "attention resources."

As the cultural consensus and celebrity coin narratives that the early Meme market relied on begin to lose their effectiveness, attention has shifted from the Meme coins themselves to the traders behind them. FOMO's rapid growth logic is built precisely on this market shift. In this model, traders replace Memes as the new content focus. Through leaderboards, trading feeds, and copy-trading mechanisms, platforms package fragmented on-chain trading behavior into a content stream resembling entertainment consumption. People have become the new vehicle for consensus.

For the many retail investors lacking professional analytical skills, following a trader who has earned millions is far simpler than researching a newly launched Meme project with no track record.

But this trend also means the Meme market is entering a more cutthroat phase. As trading volume and market attention concentrate in a handful of top traders, competition among platforms naturally shifts from acquiring users to acquiring the "super nodes" who bring users—the Meme influencers.

This closely mirrors the early streamer wars in China's short-video and livestreaming industry. Back then, platforms like Douyin, Kuaishou, Huya, and Douyu competed for top streamers with hefty signing fees, essentially vying for the gateway to user attention. The difference is that the streamer competition in short-video and livestreaming occurred within a rapidly expanding emerging market, where user scale and commercial value were still growing—ultimately driving the livestreaming industry toward maturity.

The emergence of a similar competitive model in the Meme market, however, signals something entirely different.

When platforms start fighting over the same batch of "trading influencers," the winner may gain short-term growth, but it also means the entire Meme sector is losing the vitality that was originally driven by community culture and organic virality. For Meme, that is the greatest risk.