Pump.fun: Traders Paid $2.3B in Fees, and 0.4% of Wallets Made Over $10,000

On 27 April 2024, three months after his website went live, Alon Cohen typed a message into a team chat. "we democratized trading lowcaps *so much* that everyone is exposed to the really really low odds that come with gambling such low mcaps," he wrote. If the site improved, he went on, "people will generally be happier (even though most lose)". The message surfaced in January 2026 in a US lawsuit against his company. The website was Pump.fun, and the question his message raises has followed it ever since: did anyone actually make money there?

Pump.fun lets anyone create a new cryptocurrency in under a minute, free, and charges a fee every time it is traded. The coins are memecoins: 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 later. CMZ added up the public figures to 23 October 2026. Traders have paid Pump.fun and its trading products about $2.34 billion in fees. Pump.fun kept about $1.37 billion of that. Counts of the wallets that traded there point the other way: in January 2025 only about 0.4% of them had locked in $10,000 or more.

The winners exist, and they are real. They are a small, identifiable group, and the company that runs the site is the biggest of them.

How the machine works

A new coin starts on a price formula written into code that raises the price with every purchase and lowers it with every sale, so the first buyer pays a fraction of a cent and each later buyer pays a little more. If enough people buy, the coin "graduates" to a proper exchange, since March 2025 Pump.fun's own, PumpSwap. About 1% make it.

Two terms matter. A sniper bot is software that buys a new coin in the first second it exists, before any human can click. A rug pull is when the people behind a coin sell everything at once and leave everyone else holding a token worth almost nothing. In May 2025 Solidus Labs, a firm that monitors markets for manipulation, reported that 98.6% of the more than 7 million coins launched on Pump.fun between January 2024 and March 2025 showed the signs of a pump-and-dump or a rug pull.

Who lost, by the numbers

Every trade on Solana, the blockchain (a shared public ledger) that Pump.fun runs on, is public, so the question can be answered, within limits.

The best-known count came from Adam Tehc, an analyst who built a public dashboard on Dune. In January 2025 it covered about 13.5 million wallets that had traded on Pump.fun. About 55,000 of them, or 0.41%, had taken profits of $10,000 or more. Between 293 and 294 had taken more than $1 million.

A wallet is not a person: one trader can run hundreds, and bots run many more. Cohen made that point at the time, saying about 30% of the wallets had placed only a single sell and that the dashboard left out profits made after a coin graduated, so the true number of winners was probably far higher.

©CMZ chart. Data: Adam Tehc's Dune dashboard via Decrypt and Brave New Coin

A second count runs to April 2026. CoinGecko, the price-tracking site, measured the share of wallets ending each month with a profit. It stayed below half from June 2024 to December 2025, then rose to 73.3% in April 2026. Most of those winners were small: 65% made between $1 and $500, and 5.4% made more than $1,000. The lawsuit puts its own figure on the other side: retail traders lost "between $4 billion and $5.5 billion", the plaintiffs estimate. That is a claim, not a finding.

Who won: the house, the apps and a few traders

©CMZ chart. Data: CoinGecko research

CMZ added up the daily figures that DefiLlama, a public service that tracks crypto businesses' income, publishes for Pump.fun, PumpSwap and its trading app, Terminal, from March 2024 to 23 October 2026. Traders paid $2.34 billion in fees on about $394 billion of trading. Pump.fun kept $1.37 billion; the other $961 million went to coin creators, to traders as cashback and to the trading pools. These are DefiLlama's methods and prices, and the trading total may include bots trading with themselves.

Pump.fun earned on every trade, winning or losing. In July 2025 it also raised about $1.32 billion by selling its own token, PUMP, which gives holders no share of the company, and it has since spent $456 million of its income buying PUMP back. On 24 October 2026 PUMP traded about 5% above its sale price.

The fast-trading apps that sit on top, many with built-in sniper tools, did well too: DefiLlama shows Axiom collecting $780 million in fees since January 2025 and Photon $442 million, though not all of it from Pump.fun coins.

©CMZ chart. Data: DefiLlama

Some traders made fortunes. In October 2024 the blockchain watcher Lookonchain reported that one wallet spent 5 SOL, about $727, on GOAT, a coin launched on Pump.fun, and within days had sold part of it for about $931,000 while the rest was worth about $1.49 million. In January 2025 Conor Grogan, a director at Coinbase, pointed to a single wallet that had created nearly 18,000 coins on Pump.fun and made about $3.76 million trading them.

©CMZ chart. Data: DefiLlama

The lawsuit

The case is Aguilar v. Baton Corporation Ltd. in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. It began in January 2025 and now accuses the company and its founders of running a racketeering enterprise under RICO, the US law written for organised crime. Cohen's April 2024 message came from a former team member, the complaint says, and the plaintiffs read it as proof the product "was engineered to bankrupt most users". That is their interpretation.

On 31 August 2026 Judge Colleen McMahon threw out most of it: every claim against Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation, the securities claims and the gambling theory. Buying a token "does not become a wager merely because its resale value depends on uncertain future demand", she wrote. What survived were racketeering claims by two traders against Baton Corporation, Cohen, Dylan Kerler and Noah Tweedale, built on alleged wire fraud and on running an unlicensed money-transmitting business. The judge held only that those claims were plausible enough to go forward. The company answered the complaint on 15 October 2026, and no trial date has been set. Nobody has been found liable for anything.

What Pump.fun says

In court, Baton called the complaint "speculation, unsupported hypotheses, alleged parallel commercial conduct, and inactionable puffery". It said users trade directly with the price formula, that Pump.fun never held their money, and that the plaintiffs themselves accept that "some users profited". The founders' lawyers said the case "never should have been filed".

In public, Cohen has defended the model for two years. On 29 September 2026 he wrote on X that "Pumpfun coins are the safest, most battle-tested vessels for retail traders to speculate on". The company points to the money it now hands back: creator fees, which he said in October 2026 "have recently paid well over $20m per week", and rewards for users whose trade tips others follow.

CMZ sent its questions about these figures, the April 2024 message and the lawsuit to Baton Corporation's lawyers on 24 October 2026, and to Alon Cohen on X on 25 October. It also asked the plaintiffs' law firm, Burwick Law, for comment. No reply had been received when this report was published.

Who owns it, and what others say

Pump.fun is run by Baton Corporation Ltd, registered in England in March 2023, with its office in Mildenhall, Suffolk. Companies House lists three directors, Cohen, 23, Kerler, 25, and Tweedale, 23, each owning between 25% and 50% of the shares. Its accounts to 30 September 2025 are marked overdue.

In April 2025 Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, listed Pump.fun among apps with "bad" social philosophy, alongside Terra/Luna and FTX. Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, wrote in July 2025 that "Memecoins and NFTs are digital slop and have no intrinsic value". Britain's Financial Conduct Authority warned in December 2024 that Pump.fun "may be providing or promoting financial services or products without our permission", and the site blocked UK users days later.

The latest critic is The White Whale, an anonymous trader with about 105,000 followers on X. "Imagine a casino where nearly 100% of customers lose money," he wrote on 24 October 2026. He has also promoted StonkFun, a rival launchpad. Asked by CMZ, he said he has no official link to StonkFun beyond praising its effort to build a new launchpad on Solana, that he has never been paid for his posts and his opinions are his own, and that he is the founder of SatRush, which he says he has been open about.

The rest of the picture is public. Traders paid $2.34 billion to trade on Pump.fun. The site kept $1.37 billion, and three founders own the company that runs it. On the best count available, by January 2025 about 290 wallets had made a million dollars there.