Inside the dark underbelly of crypto’s memecoin craze

Memecoin issuance platform Pump.fun’s new bounty product has produced its first controversy.

A user posting as Arivu on X said he completed a Pump.fun GO bounty last week that asked someone to tattoo the ticker “$boutywork” on their forehead and provide video proof. The task appeared to reference a token called $Bountywork, but the bounty description itself used the misspelled version “$boutywork.”

Arivu said he followed the task exactly.

“Guys I have followed everything exactly what the name mentioned in the line,” he wrote on X, adding that it was not his mistake because he tattooed the exact name mentioned by the bounty creator. “Please i gave my life,” he wrote.

The typo then became the market.

A Solana token using the ticker BOUTYWORK began trading on PumpSwap, rising to an over $600,000 market cap shortly after going live. It grabbed over $3.5 million in volume in 24 hours, 2,630 holders and roughly $43,000 of liquidity.

Arivu later posted that he had received $20,000, but from the trading fee of a token someone had launched. He shared the token address and thanked users, saying they had changed his life.

‘Pay anyone to do anything’

Pump.fun GO, announced last week, that it will let users create and complete bounties for almost any task. The company pitched it as a way to “pay anyone to do anything,” a line that sounds like internet fun (and most of the bounties are light-hearted dares) until the task becomes more exploitive, such as permanent body modifications.

The backlash on the new platform came quickly.

One X user claimed to have spoken with the tattoo shop and alleged that the person who got the tattoo may have been exploited by someone else trying to profit from the token’s price rally. A phone call to the tattoo shop made by CoinDesk went unanswered twice.

Nikita Bier, the widely-followed head of product at X, was more blunt:

“It’s sad that all the rich people left crypto and it’s now the entire industry is just teenagers in America forcing poor people to do shameful things.”

The tattoo was not the only task pushing Pump.fun GO beyond normal memecoin theater.

Other open bounties reviewed by CoinDesk showed how widespread the dares are. Some were silly internet dares, such as one that asked users to beat a watermelon-eating challenge in under 60 seconds for a reward pool of about $93.

Another offered about $663 for people to go to Los Angeles’ Skid Row, a 50-block neighborhood that contains one of the largest homeless populations known for its drug markets and extreme poverty, and interview two homeless people on camera about who they voted for.

But some started to turn dangerous.

One bounty asked people to drink a whole bottle of alcohol while promoting a token, with videos showing multiple submissions of users appearing to chug bottles in about a minute.

Another offered about $266 for someone to shave their head while screaming “Jobcoin.”

That is where the exploitative nature of memecoin frenzy shows up.

Pump.fun GO turns attention into a bounty, the bounty into content, and the content into a token trade. The person doing the stunt may get a small payout. The creator can launch a coin around it and capture far more if the market catches on.

The more attention something gets, the more profit it could potentially generate.

To be clear, Pump.fun has no role in the types of streams users choose to create, and it has an active moderation team that takes down dark or malicious content. Pump has been moderating platform activity since it started.

CoinDesk has reached out to Pump.fun for comments.

However, this isn’t the first time Pump.fun has found itself embroiled in controversial social experiments.

Previously, the platform had live streaming videos ranging from extreme dark humor to dark behavior, all in an effort to pump their tokens to a few million dollars in market capitalization.

At the time when some of these streams went live, several videos that emerged, including suicidal streams, death threats and a man locked up in his toilet continuously, were disturbing, to say the least.

And that makes for the uncomfortable part of this story.

On one side, this is the wild and wacky side of crypto internet: a typo, a bounty, a Solana token, a viral photo and a chart that goes vertical before most people understand what happened.

On the other hand, when crypto is reeling from a bear market and trying to be taken seriously by the masses, such stunts show how quickly memecoin incentives can hold back crypto’s reputation as a serious contender for everyday financial rails.