Pump.fun: The Machine That Mints 10,000 Tokens a Day

On 12 July 2025 a website that had existed for 18 months sold shares in itself, in effect, and took $600 million in about 12 minutes. The website was Pump.fun. Its business was letting anyone on the internet create a new cryptocurrency in under a minute, for next to nothing, and then charging a fee every time somebody traded it. By the time of the sale, people had used it to create millions of coins. Almost all of them were worth nothing within days.

Pump.fun was launched in January 2024 by three young founders, Alon Cohen, Noah Tweedale and Dylan Kerler, through a company called Baton Corporation. It runs on Solana, a blockchain (a shared public ledger that records who owns what, kept by thousands of computers rather than one bank) known for cheap, fast transactions. The coins it produces are meme coins: tokens with no business, no earnings and no product behind them, only a name, a picture and a joke, bought in the hope that someone will pay more tomorrow.

The scale is hard to take in. Over 11 million tokens had been launched on the site by 2025, with tens of thousands a day at the peaks. Fewer than 2% ever made it from Pump.fun's own market onto an outside exchange. By October 2026 Pump.fun had kept about $1.2 billion in fees, according to the tracking site DefiLlama, making it one of the most profitable businesses crypto has produced. For most of its customers the arithmetic ran the other way.

How the machine works

Making a coin takes a name, a ticker symbol and an image. Pump.fun then puts the coin on a bonding curve: a price formula, set in code, that raises the price a little with every purchase and lowers it with every sale. Think of a new stock with no market maker, where the first buyer pays a fraction of a cent and each later buyer pays a bit more. There is no company and no order book, only the formula.

If enough people buy, the coin "graduates": the formula is switched off and the coin moves to a decentralised exchange, an automated trading venue where buyers and sellers swap tokens directly with each other's money. At first that venue was Raydium; from March 2025 Pump.fun sent coins to its own exchange, PumpSwap. Pump.fun takes a cut of roughly 1% on trades along the way, so it earns whether a coin lives or dies.

The design made launching a coin effortless. It also made dumping one effortless. Whoever creates a coin can buy in first at the lowest price, wait for a crowd, and sell into it. A May 2025 report by Solidus Labs, a firm that monitors markets for fraud, found that 98.6% of the tokens launched on Pump.fun between January 2024 and March 2025 behaved like pump-and-dump schemes or rug pulls, where insiders cash out and leave other buyers with a worthless coin.

Who won and who lost

On-chain data, which shows every wallet's trades in public, gave a blunt answer. In January 2025 a Dune Analytics researcher found that only 55,012 of the roughly 13.4 million wallets that had traded on Pump.fun had locked in profits of $10,000 or more: about 0.4%. Just 294 had made more than $1 million. Cohen disputed the method, arguing that it ignored gains made after coins left Pump.fun. Even on generous readings, the platform worked like a casino where the house always took its cut and most players went home lighter.

The site's other experiments went worse. In May 2024 Jarett Dunn, a developer who had worked there for six weeks, used his access to drain about $2 million and scattered it across thousands of random wallets, later describing the attack as a protest against a "malicious" site. A London court sentenced him in December 2025 to six years in prison for fraud. In November 2024 Pump.fun switched off its livestream feature after users broadcast violent and disturbing stunts to promote their coins. On 3 December 2024 Britain's Financial Conduct Authority warned that the site might be offering financial services without permission, and Pump.fun blocked UK users days later.

The casino sells shares in itself

Then came the sale. PUMP, Pump.fun's own token, carries no ownership of Baton Corporation, but the company promised to spend part of its fees buying PUMP back, a crypto version of a share buyback. Buyers paid $0.004 a token. The public round took about $600 million in roughly 12 minutes, and with a private round earlier that week the total came to about $1.32 billion, one of the largest token sales in crypto history. In mid-October 2026 PUMP traded near $0.0045, a little above the sale price.

Losing traders had already gone to court. A class action filed in New York in January 2025 by Burwick Law, later combined with a suit from buyers of a coin named after Peanut the squirrel, accused Pump.fun of selling unregistered securities and running what the plaintiffs called a rigged digital casino. Later versions added Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation and Jito Labs, and claims under RICO, the US racketeering law written for organised crime. Burwick dropped Jito. On 31 August 2026 Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York threw out the securities claims, ruling that the two coins named in the complaint were not securities as pleaded, and dismissed every claim against Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation and their executives. She let racketeering claims of wire fraud, illegal gambling and unlicensed money transmission go ahead against Baton Corporation, Cohen, Tweedale and Kerler, brought by plaintiffs Kendall Carnahan and Michael Okafor. These are allegations, not findings. The case continues.

The copycats

The model spread. On BNB Chain, the blockchain run by the world's largest exchange, Binance, a launchpad called Four.meme copied the bonding-curve recipe. In October 2025 Binance's founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) posted about "BNB meme szn", coins named after him and his posts jumped by hundreds or thousands of percent within days, and for a while Four.meme's fees rivalled Pump.fun's. Zhao said any link between his posts and the coins was coincidence. The pattern was the same on every chain: a handful of early buyers made fortunes, the crowd behind them paid for it, and the launchpad was paid either way.